 Hello, my quilting friends! Leah Day here with a new quilting basics video. Today, I want to teach you all the basics to hand applique. This is the process of stitching down a piece of fabric that has a folded edge and stitching it down to a background with tiny stitches that are nearly invisible. So moving me really cool. It is a little bit of a slow technique, but I find it actually really relaxing. And it is something that is very portable. You can take it along with you anywhere you go. So let's get started first. I'm going to share with you the tools and supplies you are going to need for this job, not that many. And then how to do hand applique on our Dresden Plate Quote Block. Let's begin by gathering some tools and supplies for hand applique. I'm going to use a pair of scissors, some number nine sharps. Those are needles that are nice and thin and really good for hand applique. I do use a thimble and this is a little bit homemade. I take a clover, coin thimble, and I rip off the coin. Because I find that if the coin stays on there, I really can't feel anything through the leather. And then I put a little nick on it and then it fits nicely over my thumb. So that's how I wear my thimble. Everyone does this a little differently. Some people like thimbles on their index finger, their middle finger. It's really different for everybody. This is what works for me. So feel free to find some leather thimbles and tear them up and see what works for you. For thread, you can use just about any kind of thread so long as it's thin and strong. You want it to be thin so that your stitches are barely visible. You want it to be strong so that your hand applique never comes on like the thread never comes on gravel or comes broken. Isocboard thread is a great choice. It's nice and then comes in a million colors. I really like that for hand applique. But honestly, once I got this, I pretty much started using this entirely. This is superior threads, superbabs. This is what the package looks like. It is bottom line polyester thread and it's 60 weight to super, super thin. As you can see, it comes in a million colors. No matter what project you're working on, you can always find the right color for your project. I really like it. It's very convenient. It's very handy. That's why I started using it. The colors do vary depending on which, just whenever they're winding it. It's whatever they have extra. You might not get exactly the same colors as mine. But as you can see, it's going to come in a nice array of colors and it's super, super thin. I'm going to go ahead and get a needle prepped up and then we'll start hand appliqueing our project together. Here's my quilt project. I'm going to be hand appliqueing along the outer edge of these Dresden Plate petals. This is a turned edge. You can see that because whenever we piece these pointy edges, it creates this nice turned curve. This is going to be a really easy fun project to hand applique. I've threaded up my needle. You can see it's just a short little bit of thread. I have knotted the end. I am using a double layer of thread here. I know different quilters do in this different ways. I think that with the bottom line thread, that two layers would be really good and nice and secure. You can start either from the front and poke underneath the petal before or I like to go from the back. Basically, I'm just feeling on the back and inserting my needle and trying to insert it so that I come up right on the edge of that pink Dresden Plate. I don't really even want to stab it. I just want to come up through the background right on the edge. I've got a knot so that's going to lock in there and be secure. Now this is going to be basically just like taking little bites. Here you can see I've just inserted my needle into the fold of that Dresden Plate petal and I've taken a little bite of it. I'm going to go ahead and pull my thread all the way through with these first stitches just to make sure I'm on the right track. Then I'll take a little bite into the background. When I'm inserting this needle, I'm making sure that I am inserting it into the background right below that fold. I don't want it to be veering off at a weird angle. I want it also to run parallel with that folded edge of the Dresden Plate petal. Now I'll take another little bite into the petal. My thread here is so short, mostly for the video. Usually I don't pull all the way through this way. I'll pull just my needle through and then take the next stitch just like this and kind of chain them together. Then I'll pull the whole thing through once I have three to five stitches on my needle. I'll usually always pull through when I've just taken a stitch into the background. I do that so that way I'm not putting any extra stress on that folded edge of my applique. You can see when I pull the thread tight, not too tight, but just tight enough that it almost is completely invisible. It's pulling that folded edge into the background. It's pulling the background up to that folded edge so it forms almost an invisible join. There's almost no sign that they're stitching there. You want to keep your stitches small. I'm kind of lucky that I did bead work for years before I got into quilting. With bead work, the smallest size bead is a seed bead or a delicat bead. That's the size that kind of got logged into my head when it comes to quilting. The size of a stitch that I'm taking is about the size of a seed bead. It might even be worth it to do a little bead work and you might find that your stitches will naturally become smaller because of that. It can be very helpful. I just made a mistake and this is something that is easy to happen. I looped my thread through another thread. It's kind of forming a little bit of a mess here. Let's see if I can fix it and show you how to fix it when this happens. I'm going to pull back on my needle real gently. I'm going to try and back up the stitch. This can work if you can pull your needle backwards through the holes that you've made in the block just exactly right. I was able to do that. Now I can go back through that thread and untangle my mess without having to cut my thread tails. This is another thing I have to say. Just getting used to what thread does and what it not looks like and how to sort things out is another thing that just comes with practice. The more you do it, the more patient you are with it, the easier it will be. That's basically how you do hand-applicate. You're going to just take a little bite into that background, running parallel with that folded edge. You're going to take a little bite into that folded edge right on that fold and pull through and just keep on stitching. While it's a little slow, it's one of those wonderful things that you can do anywhere because all you need is a thimble in a needle and some thread and some scissors. You can keep all of that in a little bag. So it's very, very handy and as you can see, it's also very relaxing. So I think this is going to make a wonderful finish for this Dresden Plate. When I switch colors, so I would do pink over these pink petals and I would definitely switch thread colors. I would switch to a turquoise green for these petals. So that way the thread perfectly matches and as you can see, it's nearly invisible along that edge. So that's it for this video. I really hope that you enjoyed learning how to do hand-applicate with me today. If you have any questions about this video, definitely ask in the comments below. I'm here to help you learn more about applique and piecing this year. 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