Technicolor Vine Machine Appliqué

I remember the first time I saw machine appliqué. I was standing in a horrific line to get fabric cut at Joann's Fabrics (gag) and looked over at the Viking machines and one was whirling away at an embroidery design. An appliqué embroidery design. I had never seen that done before and I instantly loved it. Fast forward 3 years later, to now.
I’ve had a tutorial before about appliquéing letters, but here’s another appliqué tutorial, with a few more instructions this time. This time the sample item is my Technicolor Vine appliqué design.
1. Hoop your fabric and stabilizer. (duh) Load the thread color you want to use for your final satin stitching, in this case, yellow.
2. Sew the placement stitch. It’s hard to see here because without bionic eye balls because its yellow. Sorry.

3. Cut a scrap of fabric large enough to cover the placement lines, usually just a rectangle. Now you can either spray it temporary spray glue (I like 505) but I actually prefer to just starch the heck out the rectangle. Just use heavy duty spray starch that you would use for any other clothing item. (Assuming you iron, I don’t.) Lay the heavily starched square over the placement lines and sew the second stitching.

4. Remove hoop from machine and trim away excess yellow fabric with small curved appliqué scissors, $5 bucks at WalMart. DO NOT REMOVE THE fabric from the hoop!!

5. Replace hoop, sew the tack down line. This is usually a wavy zig-zag or just another straight line, depending on the design. (There may or may not be two tackdown lines sewn. Usually just one though.)

6. Sew final stitching, usually a satin stitch, but not always. Sometimes I use different types of cover stitching* like a criss cross pattern of Xs, as seen in my geranium design or even just a fancy swirly cover design, like my boutique label. But for this design, a regular ol’ satin stitch was used, as seen below.

7. Finish the embroidery process. In this case, one more leafy couple and then the stem.

8. Sew up your pillow!

*Here are some different cover stitch lines other than satin stitching.
Here’s kind of a butterfly edge (orange thread), with a zig-zaggy stem stitch (green thread) on these circle appliqués.

Here’s a criss-cross of Xs on the main petals (orange stitching) of  this geranium applique.

That’s it my cyber-embroidery buddies! Machine applique is super easy, so give it a try.