Advent day 14 – Adding details

We are making a train! A cosy Choo choo train that is on it’s way to bring you a Christmas tree or presents.

Today you will have found some shapes for the details of this project.

First we are going to make some wheels for the train. And then you can decide what you would like to put on the wagon.

Applique

There are many way to do applique. Let me start by saying, please pick you favorite method. There is no right or wrong here.

I am going to use the paper template to make the wheels. And I will do raw edge applique to make the tree on the wagon.

Wheels

Cut out a circle that is a little bit bigger than the paper template.

Use the glue stick to glue the fabric to the template.

I give it a very good press and then remove the template.

After pressing I learned that the glue is pretty strong, so a little bit will do a lot :)

Alternatives
You can also use needle and thread to do a running stitch on the back and pul the fabric around the template like that.

Or another option would be to take a piece of aluminium foil, place the fabric right side down on the foil, then the template on top. Now you can use the aluminium foil to wrap the fabric around the paper template. Then give it a good press and unwrap. 

After removing the paper I gave it another press for good measure. Then I use the glue stick again to paste the wheels in place.

Use a thin thread and needle to hand stitch the wheels in place. Or sew close to the edge on your sewing machine. I used a contrasting thread to accentuate the wheels.

Repeat these steps for all the wheels of the locomotive and the wagon. Use the darkest fabrics for the wheels.

In the image further down in this blog post you’ll see the stitches on the blue wheels.

I secured the wheels on the pink train with a special blanket stitch. Here is the stitch on my Bernina 770. Maybe your machine has a fun applique stitch as well?

I think those irregular stitches look fun on the wheels!

Tree and gifts

You can use the paper templates to make the gifts in the same way as the wheels.

Or you can use the pattern to cut out the fabric pieces and use raw edge applique to place them out your quilt.

That is what I did with the tree. I used the 505 glue stick to keep the fabric in place and secured the tree with a zigzag stitch.

This is the only picture I took of the tree before quilting my blue train 🙈 But luckily you can just see the trunk.

Tree trunk

What I did was first glue the trunk to the back of the tree. Then I placed the tree in a position I liked and cut of a little corner of the tree trunk. That way it looks like the trunk is in the wagon and the tree is hanging over the wagon.

I secured the tree as raw edge applique with a little zig zag stitch.

The next two days are to catch up with everything. I will be back on the blog on day 17 with new instructions.