Welcome, friends, to my stop on the Fast Piece Applique blog tour! If you love fun applique projects with curves and layering, yet don’t want to have to fiddle endlessly but still get great results, do I have a book for you: Rose Hughes has a new book out called Fast Piece Applique. You can see the piece that I quilted in the banner above (can you tell I’m excited??)! I’m honored and excited to do this, because Rose is a wonderful friend who constantly is offering support and encouragement to me, and gentle pushes to work on my art on my quilting journey, and she offers to her students the same warmth and encouragement.
Back before I started taking decent pictures. Sorry!
I first “met” Rose when I emailed her two years ago to ask if I could get her permission to write about the Fast Piece Applique technique that I was using for a bespoke quilt. My customer really wanted an appliqued quilt with a large Tree of Life, yet the budget needed to be kept reasonable. I knew there just had to be a way to do this applique on my longarm, and so I started poking around for different techniques that would allow me to create a detailed piece, and that is when I found Rose! The rest, they say, is history: Rose and I became good friends, and I have made several quilts and taught my version, adapted for the longarm, in my Craftsy class, which is geared for creative and nontraditional techniques. While I tend to do my projects large-scale on the longarm, it is a technique I feel is easily adaptable, with pretty much no limit to what you can do.
The top I quilted for Rose uses a variety of washable techniques using water soluble threads and white glue, which she outlines in her book. The result is a large top that hangs together and which can be loaded on the longarm or quilted on the domestic as a single cohesive top! The finished result has fun frayed edges, which I love because I love multiple elements of texture.
“Bull’s Eye Roses” designed and appliqued by Rose Hughes, quilted by me. Photo by Bruce Kane, for Martingale
For the Blog Tour today, Rose has some pretty great things she’s made for y’all. For each stop on the tour, she’s provided a free pattern for a Valentine’s Day heart, with a word on it, and she’s picked a word for each of us that she thinks resonates.
Images for all applique designs provided by Rose Hughes
My word is “leap”, and it couldn’t be more perfect. When I think of “leap”, I think of my quilting journey, and how I’ve taken a deep breath and just jumped so many times, wholeheartedly. You can find the free pattern here (link to PDF)!
They look great all together as a Love Quilt
…or as Love Pillows
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! I am happy to tell you that you can win your every own e-book of Fast Piece Applique by Rose Hughes by leaving a comment below. Just tell me what project you’d try with this awesome technique when you leave it! I will leave the contest open until 9 PM EST on 1/16/2015, so a solid week.
To learn more about Rose and her book, and to find the other PDF patterns for the Valentine’s Day hearts, make sure to visit the other stops on the blog tour!
Happy Quilting!
I have quite a few projects I would like to try this on, especially using my own pictures of pets, peoples faces, flowers etc. I would love to receive her book to refer to. Thank you for this interesting and informative post!
I would try leap because with every new quiilt I’m making a leap of faith that it will come out the way i see it in my mind.
Excited about the idea of attaching everything in a temporary fashion and then loading it on a longarm and appliquing and quilting all in one step.
I’ve had a landscape quilt in my mind for years – a scenic vista I drive past at least once a week. This looks like the perfect technique to turn my idea into reality!
How interesting. I’ll definitely have to get a copy of Rose’s book at some point. I haven’t tried appliqué since high school, and I’d like to get back in to it, but the fiddly-ness of it has been holding me back from trying it out. And I’ll definitely be looking at your class (I’m a bit behind on the online classes at the moment). I was sure there had to be a way of apply appliqué on the longarm, but no one I spoke with seemed to know how to do it. There’s a wonderful quilt in a book I own by Kathy Doubty of Material Obsession that involves a rather large piece of appliqué, and I’ve been admiring it for months, but was absolutely sure that it would end in disaster if I tried it on my home machine. I absolutely adore those hearts. Just gorgeous!
I began my quilting journey just about 2 years ago and I started by simply finding a pattern that I thought I could do and went for it. I found that I can easily add all the things I enjoy doing embroidery, crochet with quilting.
I like how the pillows look. I think my little granddaughters would love to pile them up and fall into their cushy-ness :o)
I would like to do a quilt with my granddaughters name on it
I’ve got a pattern of Mary with baby Jesus that I have been waiting for the right applique method. I think this is it.
Oh I can just see this as individual pictures on my granddaughters wall….she would love it. I guess I would use gesso and add the fabric pieces to a canvas board and then pick about 6 of the words to decorate one wall….she would love it. Thanks so much for being part of the tour
I’m think I could shrink these patterns down a litlle and make some pincushions out of them. Thanks for sharing Rose’s new technique.
I am very interested in this technique. I’d like to make a wall hanging for my sewing room featuring hydrangeas of differing colors. It would always remind me of summer, no matter how frigid it is out there!
I would live to try a landscape quilt of my back yard view
I want to do a Valentine table runner and most of these will be great! Thanks for the chance to win 🙂
I’ve been playing with weaving fabric and this technique is perfect for adding something extra to one of my weavings. Love her technique since I’m apt to simplify anything –
I would like to do Umbrellas!
Love all kinds of applique techniques. Favorite is her Birch tree quilt.
I’d love to make a wall hanging from a photo I’ve taken, maybe a landscape.
Thanks for a chance to win.
usairdoll(at)gmail(dot)com
I would love to use this technique for some pillows- my daughter just transitioned to a “big girl” room and I have so many ideas for fun pillows, but not a lot of time! Thanks!
I would like to make the umbrella flower designed quilt.
I would love to learn the technique to give my impression of the wonderful mountain views where I live. There are so many wildflowers that would be pretty in fabric if I only found a way to put it together. I’ve already taken a leap and I’m in…
Comments are closed! Thanks for stopping by, y’all! Ill announce a winner tomorrow.