Designing Applique Patterns

Series Summary

Iron-on appliques are decorative elements that are ironed onto clothing, quilts, or other fabric to enhance its beauty or sentimentality. You can buy appliques, or even better, you can be make your own iron-on applique. All you need are some supplies such as thread and adhesive paper, and some creativity. Learn how to make an iron-on applique in this free video series on making and using appliques featuring sewing expert Misty Swift. Swift will demonstrate how to design an applique, how to use a picture for making an applique, how to prepare material for making an applique, how to position an applique on fabric, how to iron-on an applique, how to attach stitch and tear with pins, how to stitch an applique onto fabric, and how to remove excess stitching on an applique.

Video Transcript

"Hello! Today I'm going to show you how to make an applique. Such as you would put on a purse or a blanket or skirt or whatever you're making. You start out by deciding what kind of applique you want to make. If you don't like to draw. A good way to go it, is to go on-line. And look up coloring pages. And you could only scale up or down, what you're looking for. That's a really good idea to get a basic shape. Because that's what you need to go from. I usually like to draw mine out. Because I don't want it to look like any other applique, I've done. So l lot of times, I'll just kind of, play around with a few different shapes. Kind of, trying to keep in mind how much space I have on the material that I'm doing. And also, how much material I have that I want to use on it. Kind of, had an urge to do a tree, once. I think that's what, we're going to do. And it just needs to be very simple. And the more detailed you try to make it, the more complicated you make. The less likely, it's going to turn out, like you want it. And actually, I'm going to try one more. It doesn't hurt to do a couple. And you can always pick, which one you like, best. And this is just kind of, a general idea. Because I usually change it, once I get down to cutting it out. And you can always adjust it, to how you like it. I'm going to go, kind of, something like that. You'll notice it better, once it's cut out. Ta dam. Something like that. And that's how you start it."