Stonefields Applique Prepped, Blocks 5-13 + Applipops vs Perfect Circle Templates

Good morning, my lovelies!  I have been having so much fun prepping my Stonefields Month One appliqué blocks this week!  You know, digging through scrap bins and working with scissors and something suspiciously similar to Elmer's School Glue to put these little blocks together makes me feel like I've been transported across space and time back to kindergarten arts and crafts.  It's magical and so cathartic.  If you are someone who admires appliqué from a distance but thinks "I'd never have the patience," I urge you to give it a try sometime.  It is so much like those school projects from decades ago where we dug through old catalogs and wallpaper sample books and construction paper scraps from other projects, cutting things out with our safety scissors (we were fussy cutting!) and trying to eat the paste when the teacher wasn't looking.  I know of no other pastime that can make me forget my arthritis and my wrinkles, dissolve all the cares of the world, and make me feel like a 5-year-old again.

Here are my Stonefields Blocks 5-13, prepped and ready for stitching:

Stonefields Blocks 5-13, Prepped and Ready to Stitch

When I say that my blocks are "prepped and ready for stitching," I mean that I've made heat resistant plastic templates for all of the applique shapes, selected the fabrics, traced the shapes onto the wrong side of my fabric scraps with a pencil, cut the shapes out with an eyeballed scant 1/4" turning allowance, and preturned those seam allowance/turning allowances by wetting them with starch and pressing them back over the edges of the heat resistant templates.  Then I used the pattern sheets and a light box to position the applique shapes on my background fabric and basted them in place temporarily using tiny dots of Roxanne's Glue Baste-It (this post contains affiliate links).  I put those drops of glue about an eighth to a sixteenth inside the edge of the patch so I won't be hand stitching through the glue.  By the way, this preparatory process is exactly the same regardless of whether I was planning to stitch the shapes down by hand or with my sewing machine using an invisible appliqué stitch.  If sewing by machine I would just need to slip scraps of tearaway embroidery stabilizer beneath each block before stitching to prevent puckering.  I'm not going to promise that there won't be any machine stitched applique on this quilt, but for now I'm going to stitch my applique by hand using my favorite YLI 100 wt Silk thread and my Bohin size 12 Applique Needles.  I love how these thin needles and thread create truly invisible stitches that just sink into my fabric and disappear.

A Spoonful of Sugar, A Capful of Starch + Quilting That Is More Fun Than Stitch In the Ditch

Well, my plan was to complete all of the SID (Stitch In the Ditch) quilting throughout the entirety of my 102" x 102" Deco quilt before starting to quilt the fancy designs.  Instead, I got this wild Mary Poppins idea in my head about how a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and it probably wouldn't hurt to quilt just a few fancy designs on my quilt before I advanced to SID the next row, just to see what they will look like...

Finally Some Quilting I Can See!

In hindsight, the designs I stitched in the light blue squares are more densely quilted than I had intended.  I knew this 10% into stitching the first one, and I could have stopped the machine right then, picked out those stitches, and chosen a less dense, faster stitching design.  But I didn't want to spend 30 minutes picking out those stitches.  Now I'll have to quilt the rest of the behemoth of a quilt more densely to balance it out, which will take an extra hundred hours or so...  😳. I have a very peculiar and inefficient laziness whereby avoiding work creates much more work.  Anyway, it's gratifying to see some quilting texture on this quilt.   As this is a bed quilt and I want it to finish softer than cardboard, I"m using 50 wt matte polyester So Fine thread in my needle paired with MagnaGlide 60 wt thread in my bobbin.  This is going to take forever...  Wicked thought: What if I just CUT THE QUILT OFF at the bottom of this row, and instead of a bed quilt it can be a TABLE RUNNER?!  

Here's how those designs look in the setting triangles across the top of the quilt stitched in contrasting Teal thread against the solid Indigo background fabric:

Setting Triangles Quilted in So Fine Thread, Color Teal Against Indigo Fabric

All day today and yesterday, in between forced frisbee outings with His Little Highness the Dog, I was working on my Deco quilt.  But wait -- there's more!  A few days ago, I started prepping appliqué for my Stonefields quilt!