Appliqued Onesie Tips

I recently came across the most helpful tips I have found in a long time, and wanted to share them with you. Yes, you... if you are out there... I got no comments on my last post, so maybe you haven't been wondering if I fell off the face of the earth!  Ha ha! Oh well, if nothing else, this blog is a great place for me to keep track of my sewing and crafting projects!

Anyway, Terri over at A Creative Princess shared this post about machine applique back in March. I don't know about you, but whenever I have done machine applique on baby onesies in the past, I always had a hard time sewing them. Sometimes the onesie would bunch up, and it was always hard for me to see where I was sewing.

Terri shared two fantastic tips. The first one is to use an open toe foot on your machine when sewing appliques. That is probably common sense, but honestly, I never even thought about it. I just happened to find a clear plastic open toe foot at my local Wal-Mart for around $9.00, and boy has it made sewing easier. Now I can actually see where I am sewing, and it makes it so much easier getting around curves and corners.

The second tip Terri shared was so awesome and amazing and wonderful ... it has made a HUGE difference for me. She uses freezer paper as a stabilizer underneath the applique when she sews it on. All you do is cut a small piece of freezer paper and place it inside the onesie, with the shiny side towards the fabric. You don't need to iron it on or pin it or anything.. it stays in place just fine.

Since I have started using the freezer paper, I have had no problems at all with the onesie bunching up on me at all. Here is what it looks like after you have sewn it on:

This is the inside of my onesie. Notice that you need to have the freezer paper a little larger than your applique. Since you have put the shiny side of the freezer paper towards the fabric, it makes it much easier to tear off when you are done. To help it along, I used my seam ripper and made little tears inside my letter like this:

Here it is with the paper all torn off:

And here is the finished product:

No bunching or binding of the fabric at all. I also played around with the stitches and tried to make a tighter zig zag stitch and I think it looks pretty good!

Here is another one I made:

I cut the dump truck and sign out of some fabric I had and just sewed around it. I even put this little sign on the back of the onesie:

Cute huh?!  (Please ignore the small piece of yellow fabric I had to sew on there, my bobbin thread got all messed up and made a hole in the onesie when I tried to take it off the machine)

I will be using these tips from now on whenever I sew machine applique. Let me know if you give them a try and how they work for you!

Hello!!

Some of you probably wondered if I fell off the face of the earth!  No, I have just been keeping busy since the first of the year. We got a new puppy January 2 and she is ALOT of work!!  I had no idea! She is my first dog ever, so it has been a new experience for me.  Her name is Lulu and she is an absolutely adorable Malti-Poo:

She is 5 months old now and quite a handful. She is a little ball of energy, but she is so much fun and is a great addition to our family.

I have done some sewing projects, but unfortunately the hard drive in my computer crashed a few months ago, so I lost ALL of my pictures. I am still trying to see if I can get someone to try to recover all the stuff from that hard drive. :(

I do have a couple of recent projects I can show you though. I found a great tutorial from the Missouri Star Quilt Company for a self-binding baby blanket. You can find it here. I subscribe to their You Tube channel because they regularly post great sewing and quilting videos... be sure and go check them out. Here is what my finished blanket looks like:

And here is an up-close shot of the stitching:

I just followed along with the video and it was such an easy project. It was neat to be able to use some of the special stitches on my machine that I so rarely use. I bought some flannel on sale recently at Jo-Anns and plan on making three more of these! I think they will make great baby gifts.

I made this cute Car Cozie for our great-nephew:

It is made sort of like the crayon caddies, with pockets to hold their little cars, and a road built right in!  Tutorial can be found here.

For our nephew and his fiance, I made this pillow and then with the leftover scraps, the coasters/holder to match:

The pattern for both of these projects can be found here.

On the crafting side, I made an Easter wreath out of tulle:

I used the instructions found here.

I am currently working on baby projects; seems that there are always people I know having babies! I want to make more of those self-binding blankets, along with some pee pee tee pees, since everyone seems to be having boys!

I will post pictures when I got those projects finished. Hope everyone is doing well - I promise it won't be so long between posts next time!  :)