Before you are ready to stitch, you must first choose a design. If you are a
beginner, you should try to choose a design that consists of only a few large
pieces. You can draw your own design, or use one from a pattern that you have
copied. Center your design on your base fabric, and transfer it using carbon
paper. You will then need to trace around each individual shape of the pattern,
creating your template pieces. These templates can be transferred onto pieces of
cardboard, making them easier to trace around.
You will need to decide what fabric pieces you will use in your design next.
This can be one of the most difficult tasks of appliquéing. Before you make your
final decisions, lay your fabric choices next to each other, being sure that
they all complement one another. A wrong choice in fabric shades, or tones, will
stick out like a sore thumb, and distract the eye of the viewer.
Cutting Your Fabric
How you cut your fabric will depend on whether you are going to be hand
appliquéing or machine appliquéing the scrap pieces onto your base fabric.
Cutting hand appliqué pieces will require leaving a seam allowance, while
machine applique pieces can be cut directly on the traced template lines.
About Hand Applique
Hand appliqué requires painstaking stitch work by the artists, and can be
very time consuming, but produces heirloom quality pieces. The result is well
worth the amount of time that can be spent creating a hand appliquéd piece.
Among antique quilt collectors, one of the most prized types of quilts is the
Baltimore Album Quilt. These quilts are a sampler of hand appliquéd designs,
often worked in bright and cheery colors such as red and green on a white
background or base fabric. The blocks were often designed by the quilt maker to
represent meaningful events in their lives and act as a fabric journal of sorts.