Spring Tulip Place Mats

Spring isn't springing here in central Alberta as it should! (We got dumped with another 5 inches of wet heavy snow yesterday. All the winter snow hasn't even melted!) So I thought I might help spring along by making some spring place mats in colorful pastel batik fabrics. This is a pattern I found online from the "Quick and Easy Quilting" magazine April 2002 Vol. 24 No. 2 Pages 52-54.

The place mats are coming along well, but as with most things, I guess, they are taking longer and a bit more work than expected.

The tulips themselves are pieced, but the stems and leaves are appliqued onto the mats afterwards. I'm not very experienced with applique work to say the least, but I decided it was time to change that.

My first experience was with hand applique on a few of the blocks on my very first quilt, my sunflower sampler quilt.  Then I hand appliqued the hearts on my "I Love Hearts" tote bag, (the one my husband calls my "Mary Poppins" bag!  :)

The reason I hand appliqued them was because I hand quilted most of my first quilt and, for some reason my sewing machine (Pfaff 1540) doesn't have a decent satin stitch. It also helps to use the proper fusible web material with your appliques which was a mistake I made with the tote bag hearts.

The 'Lite Seam 2 Seam' fusible web I'm using now works pretty well. Making the leaves was easy although time consuming... Tracing the leaf shapes on the fusible web paper, then cutting them out, peeling off the back paper,  ironing the leaf shapes to the back of the green fabric, then cutting the fabric leaves out, peeling off the 2nd paper backing and finally ironing then on the place mats.

Doing the stems was harder...  Cutting a long half inch strip of green fabric and and a long piece of the fusible web about the same size, then attaching the fabric strip to the fusible web, by slowly stripping one side of the paper off as you try and attach the strip of fabric, pressing it on to the sticky web with your fingers was a bit tricky.  Next it had to be chopped up to stem sizes and ironed on the placemats.  I made the mistake of trying to iron the fabric to the long strip of fusible web so now I have sticky web on my iron....  Plus its important to make sure you peel the proper side of the paper off first. Why in the heck the fusible web isn't labelled, I don't know!

But, okay, so far so good!   I have 4 place mats tops mostly done... Now comes the hard part:  I have a new sewing machine (a beautiful Janome 7700) with all kinds of fancy embroidery stitches, but I haven't yet tried to applique on it. I need to check the manual and see which foot to use and which setting to put it on, thread to use, then do a practice applique with the 2 extra leaves I made.
So.... time to get to work! :)