Adventurous Applique Island Batik Blog Hop

 

Dancing Daisies by Connie Kauffman  44" x 54"

September is time for another Island Batik Ambassador Challenge.  This month the theme is Adventurous Applique with Aurifil.

 In my July Island Batik box was a bundle of the collection called Daisy May.  I LOVE daisies and this collection is full of them.  

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The Daisy May collection has bright oranges, yellows, teals and greens and some fabrics with a lighter background.  This collection is a Spring/Summer 2024 collection and is by Kathy Engel and should be arriving in shops now.  Be sure and look for them!

The sponsor for this challenge is Aurifil Thread.  They sent us a lovely selection of threads to match our fabric collection that we could use in our project.  I ended up using some white Aurifil I had and the pretty yellow you see below.

Island Batik also sent yardage in a light and dark color to match the collection.  The light fabric is from their Foundations collections and is called Glaze and the green fabric is from the Daisy May collection called Mini Daisy Turquoise.  I used Glaze to make the daisy petals in my quilt.

Guidelines for this challenge were to make a lap quilt with applique.  The applique was supposed to be attached with some kind of different edge stitching.  They suggested doing the technique by 4th and 6th Designs that they used on their quilt Full Bloom.  Their technique is raw edge and glue basted with no fusible used.. If you want to see this technique, you can watch these two tutorials by 4th and 6th Designs.

YouTube Video demonstrating the edge-coloring technique. 

Shabby Fabrics YouTube video on the edge painting technique.

This technique glues the applique pieces down and does a sort of free hand, back and forth method of stitching over and over. I tried this technique and it wasn't for me!  I thought about doing a machine decorative stitch around my appliques, but I didn't want to be turning the quilt on all those petals.  I tried a few different edge techniques, and finally decided on just doing a freehand loopy/circle around the applique edges.  For the center of the daisies I did loopy/circles thru the whole piece.

While I was deciding what edge stitching to do, I selected 7 of the blue/green fabrics to make a center panel of simple 5"finished squares.  Then I picked out 7 of the yellow/orange fabrics to make a border of 5" finished squares.  That was easy and I decided to go ahead and layer and baste and do basic straight line quilting before adding the applique.  The Daisy May collection has 20 fabrics and I used 14 of them in this quilt.

Most of the time persons finish the applique before basting and quilting the quilt top, but I thought it might be easier to do it this way.  I wanted to try the technique of gluing the raw edges of the applique.  I've done some collage quilting with fusibles and I wondered if this would be easier than ironing all that fusible webbing on to fabrics..

I laid out the daisy petals and the flower centers made from an older yellow Island Batik collection.  I used Roxanne's Glue-Baste-It and found it worked very well.  The glue held up to a lot of manipulation.  I liked how the bottle had a very small tip for applying the glue.

I always use Schmetz Needles and they sewed thru the glue very well. I didn't notice when I was sewing thru the  glue.  Hobbs Cotton Batting worked well with this technique also.

Thanks to Island Batik, Aurifil Thread, Schmetz needles and Hobbs Batting for providing products to use in this project thru the Island Batik Ambassador program.

Every week of the blog hop Island Batik has a tremendous giveaway.  This week it is for two collections called Bubbles, Curves and Corners and Twilight.  Each bundle has a half yard of each fabric in the collection.  Be sure and go to Island Batik to enter to win one of these great bundles!

I am having my own giveaway of two of the half yard cuts from the Daisy Mae collection.  These two fabrics have a light cream background.  One has cute little daisy prints and the other one has dots and dashes in a variety of colors.  Leave a comment telling me your favorite flower to enter the drawing.  USA entries only due to postage costs.  Make sure that I can contact you if you are a winner.

Be sure and visit the other Island Batik Ambassadors (see my last post for all the Ambassadors) and see all the new collections and special quilts.  Also be sure and enter the Island Batik special drawing each week!