Edyta Sitar has a beautiful collection of 24 Baltimore album-type blocks called Elegant Garden available on a DVD for embroidery in many formats. The embroidery group offshoot of my quilting guild has taken on the task of learning to make this highly stylized, formal, and beautiful machine appliqued/embroidered in the hoop, guided carefully and expertly by Sherry N, our guru embroidery software teacher.
This is block #2. After we finished block #1, Sherry said that we had just finished the hardest block in the collection, and we all went around and patted ourselves on the back about how well we had done the first time at bat.
Sherry lied. I thought this second block was harder than the first. It's the cutting. Even using the spoon billed applique scissors, it is very hard to cut one micron away from the placement thread. And it really does need to be extremely close to those stitches, because otherwise, excess fabric will show beyond the satin stitch.
Sometimes I have erroneously cut through the placement stitches, but Sherry has a nice little trick to keep our appliques in line: we line our fabric with Steam-A-Seam. Once it has been anchored by the placement stitches, we trim the excess away and then iron the fabric to the background. So now, no matter how many stitches you may have accidentally cut through, that sucker won't come off of there while the zigzag stitch and then the satin stitch is applied.
Here is block #3. This one was definitely easier. Not so many inner curves to cut out.
I have three more to do before the 7th. But I need to bind that baby quilt first.
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