quilting around a raised applique

I have been working on this quilt for months.  I am stitching it on my Pfaff Powerquilter which is a sitdown machine similar to the Sweet 16.

There are these holly berries on the quilt that are fabric covered googly eyes.  they make the greatest 3D berries on this quilt.

But stitching around them was rather difficult.  I quilted as close as I could with my foot on, so about 1/4 inch away.  But that left big lumps in the quilt, unacceptable.  

So I thought and thought, and what I came up with actually worked!  I brought the quilt to my Bernina 153 (20 yr old domestic) and took off the presser foot, Yikes!  

I carefully stitched around the googly eyes, watch  here: 

quilting around raised applique

It looks kinda floopy, the fabric bouncing around because there is no presser foot to hold it down.  But when I looked on the back it looked great.  

So I just had to share my technique and film it for posterity.  If you try this, be very careful.  I broke a needle when it hit the googly eye on my first try.  Scary...  But I was extra cautious after that.  

Got 'em all done now and I will be sharing pics of this quilt in a couple of days.  It will be so nice to move on to another project. 

I painted a little on my cameo and it really made it pop.  I used a pink neocolor II crayon to make the background color.  I plan to make a larger cameo next.  So fun!

I'll be back, I promise, Karen

"I always believed that if you set out to be successful, then you already are." Katherine Dunham

Cameo quilting

Hi, I know it's been a long time.  I am eager to share a new project that I made last weekend.   I will share how I made it so you too can make a cameo quilt.

I took a photo of the cameo and changed it to black and white in Photoshop.  Then I printed it out onto 4 sheets of paper using Posterazor App.  Taped the papers together to make a large pic.

 Now I used tracing paper to outline the lines that I wanted to quilt on.

 Here is the tracing paper without the picture behind it.  I see I missed a little bit of her head scarf - no biggie, I filled it in.

 Now I have a piece of creamy radiance fabric on top of the tracing paper which is on my lightbox.  I then lightly traced the lines onto the radiance with a pink prismacolor pencil.

I backed the fabric with two layers of wool batting and a piece of purple silk for the backing.  I then quilted all the lines with a pink Glide thread.  

I enhanced some of the creases with cherry pink tsukineko ink and a fantastik applicator

 She's about 15 inches tall and 10 inches wide.

 Here's the back with the purple silk and no paint.

This was a fun project and was just a test sample for a larger piece that I hope to share soon.  Thanks for dropping by, Karen