Primitive Applique

For many years I was a piecer. The “A” word really scared me. And in all reality I was happy piecing my quilts! Then the ideas started forming and to execute these ideas I was going to have to learn to appliqué. After poor attempts at this art I decided to take a class. I learned the ins and outs of appliqué and made my daughter a nice appliqué quilt for her birthday. Not long after I took a class from Terry Clothier Thompson, I will admit that Terry has influenced me greatly in my quilting. Since this first class I have taken many from Terry and continue to learn from her. In that first class I took with her she showed us some amazing appliqué quilts. She then had us look closely at them and many were appliquéd using a running stitch. These were quilts that were over 100 years old and had held up. She challenged us to use this stitch when appliquéing. Well there was no way I was going to give this a try. I had just learned to appliqué correctly and I just knew the quilt police would be all over me if I switched to the running stitch. So I went home from this class and continued to work using my slower but beautifully executed stitches. The funny thing was that I was getting no where real fast. I had all these ideas going through my head but my fingers couldn’t keep up with them. I decided I would give Terry’s method a try and to my utter amazement I loved it. I could work really quickly and I found that as long as I kept the thread color matched to the fabric, you really couldn’t tell that I had done a running stitch. I played around with this and started doing what I call “Primitive Applique”. This consists of not marking your background fabrics with the appliqué shapes as you would normally do. I just slap my pieces onto the fabric and either glue or pin them down depending on the size of the quilt top. I mark my shapes on freezer paper, cut out and iron onto the top of the fabric and cut out a scant ¼” from the edge. I like to have a bit larger piece of fabric to tuck under, this way I know I will catch both pieces when doing the stitch and it will stay secure. I then start pushing the fabric under the freezer paper piece as I stitch, a basic needleturn method, and using the running stitch go just along the top edge of the fabric. I have been able to complete a lot of quilts using this method and many have been washed numerous times and have held up perfectly.
Guess what, the quilt police never did show up. In fact they called me a primitive artist. Go figure! Now I teach other quilters my lazy methods and get paid for it. The greatest satisfaction I have received is from being able to actually complete some projects that I would otherwise not have gotten done. I challenge you to give it a try!
The quilt above is titled “Be free”. A couple of local guilds had asked me to come teach Primitive Applique and I didn’t want them to all bring in a different pattern to work on. So I designed this to cover all the areas we would work on, curves, circles, layering and points. Of course I couldn’t leave off words!