It is Week 3 of the Spooky Sampler Quilt Sew Along and you will find that Pat Sloan is doing a YouTube quilt along and Melissa Mortenson at Polkdotchair.com. The pattern is by Melissa Mortensen and features Traditional Piecing & Raw Edge Applique with fun and traditional Halloween features. The pattern comes is a super cute box with all the fabrics by Riley Black called Spooky Hollow!
This week Pat Sloan is doing the the applique bats, spiders and pieced tall pumpkins. The pumpkins are exactly like the pumpkins from last week, just a different size.
The bats and spiders are applique and Melissa provides the template to trace for the bats and spider. I used my cricut to cut out the two spiders and three bats. It worked really well once I figured out how to get it scanned in and get the outlines smooth enough for the cricut to cut.
I made a video of putting together week 3 and you can watch it here:
The pattern is very easy to read, she breaks down how all the fabrics are to be cut and how they are to be pieced. She also gives instructions on how to do raw edge applique if you are not familiar with it. I used Steam-A-Seam Lite2 for my applique pieces.
I peeled off one side of the Steam-A-Seam Lite2 and ironed it on the back of my fabric for about 3 seconds just to adhere it before I put it through my Cricut machine. Once it was cut all I had to do was peel off the other side and iron it down on to the background fabric.
At this point all I had to do was use my Janome Memory Craft Horizon Sewing Machine to applique the pieces. I chose a basic blanket stitch for the bat, and a straight stitch for the spider. The spiders legs are pretty skinny so a straight stitch was about the only option. The thread I used is a Guterman Top Stitch for topstitching and Sew Fine Thread for the bobbin. The Guterman has a nice shiny sheen to it and is thicker make the stitch pop off the fabric.
Next up was the pumpkins, and these are exactly like the pumpkins we did last week, just taller. Once I got all those pieces cut, it was just a matter of sewing the pieces together. She uses the Snowball technique to make the pumpkins bodies and she does a very good job on explaining how to do this. I used my Janome 1600P-QC Sewing Machine to piece these together, that machine is a straight stitch machine and is already set up in one of my tables. It is a great straight stitch machine. To do my piecing I use Aurifil 50wt Thread, this thread is strong but fine enough that it doesn’t create any bulk when piecing.
Before I started appliqueing the bats and spiders, I used my Cricut Maker to cut the pieces out for me.
I scanned the image into my computer as a .jpg and then uploaded it to Cricut Design Space and then resized it to the dimensions of the bat and spider. I told my Cricut to then cut bonded material with the rotary cutter that comes with the Cricut Maker, and then I went and did my dishes while the Cricut did all the work!
The picture on the left shows the bats that have been cut on the Cricut . I removed the fabric around them and gently lifted them from the mat.
If you have any questions about how I used the Cricut to cut my appliques, I would love to hear from you and try to answer your questions.
If you are working on this quilt, let me know and let me know what fabrics you chose for your pieces. You can put a picture on the facebook post also showing all of us your beautiful work!
Following is a list of items that I used to make this project!
Heat Erasable Fabric Marking Pens
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