How to Run a Stitch for Appliqué

Video Transcript

"JEANETTE WHITE: Hi. I'm Jeanette White with Expert Village and Piper's Quilts & Comforts is located in Salt Lake City, Utah in Sugarhouse. Today, we're doing the English method of hand applique. We started by tracing our design on the back of our background fabric with a brown micron pen. Now, we're going to take heavy quilting thread and a heavy needle, and we're going to do a little tiny running stitch right on top of that brown line all the way around following our brown line that we've made with our micron. And once we've gone all the way around then we can clip our thread and then we're going to thread our applique thread. I like the number 50 weight DMC thread because it's a very lightweight and it does knot very much and it produces a quite an invisible stitch. I'm not crazy about silk thread because it doesn't have a long shelf life. Now, I'm going to flip this over to the right side and you can see, I now see on the right side this outline where I have done my running stitch going through all the layers with my applique patch on the front. So I've now got both sides of the right side facing up on the applique patch which is here and my background fabric here. I'm going to take my applique thread and do my beginning knot. The knot that your mother taught you, this one where you lick your finger and then go around doesn't hold. So now, we're going to take the long thread, crisscross it with our needle, pick up the bottom thread, wrap it around two or three times, the more wraps, the bigger the knot, pinch it, take our left hand and pull this through. And there you have a perfect tiny little knot that will never come undone. Trim the tail as close to the knot as you dare. And now, we can begin our applique process."