Anyway, the reason for this ramble is that I tried out appliqué for the first time on the back of the doll quilt I showed you before. I was inspired by a tutorial at Sew Like My Mom: she's made so many fun things, and I love the way she's used appliqué. I found an equivalent of Heat 'n' Bond (Bondaweb) at a local fabric shop, found a simple image of a letter A via Google images and began following the instructions.
Thankfully the letter A is horizontally symmetrical so I didn't need to worry about any potential 'you can only look at this quilt in the mirror' issues. Having ironed on the A I then began to sew around it. And oh my goodness, was it fun! I had a great big stupid grin on my face the whole time. Just look at how cute those zig-zags are!
I'll definitely be using this technique a lot more in future. I've already used it in 2 other projects, and I'm still loving it.
After finishing the backing, all that was left was to bind the quilt. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that the binding process didn't go well. I won't go into details, but it was third time lucky in the end... And then I found this tutorial on an awesome blog named In Color Order. Her technique involved not only a neater way of doing the corners, but also a way to avoid having to hand-sew together the dreaded join. I was excited to say the least. But was it worth unpicking the binding which I'd already got wrong so many times? After a few deep breaths I decided it was, and gave the new method a go. It worked amazingly! So grateful for Jeni's tutorial. I did a couple of things differently (stuck to hand-sewing-to-the-back and sorted the corners and join when I got to them rather than at the start) but her tips were so, so helpful :)
I'll post full pictures plus the last bit of this project soon :)
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