Hand Appliqué

After testing the pattern, making the stencil, and dying the fabric, it was time to get started with the fun part . . . lots and lots of hand stitching!

There are many different ways to stencil fabric, but I knew I did not want to use fabric paint.  For one, it is something else to purchase.  Also, I do not like the idea of working with a fabric that has been painted.  It seems to me it would get stiff and difficult to hand sew.  So I went the lazy route . . . a Sharpie pen.  

I started with a green felt tip.  There was some drag across the fabric, but nothing terrible.  However, I did not like the way the color looked on the blue jersey.  (My plan is to remove the inked portion, but there are probably going to be sections that remain after everything is trimmed away.)  

After digging around in a desk drawer, I came up with a blue fine tipped pen.  I was concerned that it would not show up well on the fabric, but it is clearly visible, even without the benefit of daylight.  And it glides across the fabric more easily than the thicker tipped Sharpie.

I started my swatch with two small pieces of the dyed cotton jersey.  I have quite a few spools of hand quilting cotton thread and found a blue I thought would look nice with my fabric.  After looking at my sample in the daylight, I decided I did not like the color of the thread - it looked too gray on the bright blue fabric.

And I am making a note:  I am going to have to find different scissors to trim off the top layer.  For my samples, I used a small pair of embroidery scissors, but my fingers started to cramp after a few minutes.  My other small scissors are not up to this task.

Time to cut out my skirt pieces!

Once each piece was cut, the next step was to apply the stencil.  The stencil was placed over the fabric and held in place with magnetic pin holders.  

I decided to orient the pattern along the grainline of the fabric.  Starting at one end, I traced each cutout with my Sharpie pen.  This went very quickly.  The Pellon is thick enough to keep the pen on track and makes for easy tracing.

Next, the stenciled fabric was matched back to its plain jersey counterpart and pinned together.  Thankfully, this fabric like to stick to itself, so I went easy with the pins.

And now I can look forward to many hours of hand sewing!  I am very excited!!