 Hey everybody, it's Rob from Man Sewing and today I've got a skill builder tutorial for you. How many of you out there have been wishing you knew how to make your very own applique for quilt patterns out of photographs? That's right. Today, I'm going to show you and you're only going to need a Sharpie marker, some paper, and your favorite photograph, basically. That's right. Computers are so easy to use nowadays. And cameras are so terrific and your cell phones are almost as great, right? Any photograph you take or any image you find on the internet or outline image you find on the internet can be translated into an applique pattern. I want to give you a few of the basic steps. Real quick, think about your computer. You may have some software that you've owned for a long time like Photoshop, of course one of my favorites, but that can be a little pricey if you don't have it. So there's another program I want you to investigate if you don't have an art based program for your computer and it's called GIMP. GIMP, and it's available for all the operating systems out there. And I use that to take my photograph and create a map that is a little bit less than pretty so that I have some grainy lines to trace those tracings, then become the applique. So let's back up a couple of steps and talk a little bit more about what we're going to do to get to the point where the Sharpie becomes our favorite tool, right? So I've got my image in my computer and because we're going to be tracing these in the long run on fusible web that has a paper back, we want to transpose or mirror flip our image. So take your image and just flip it over so that it is backwards technically and that will be correct when we're done tracing it and cutting it out of regular fabric. The next thing I find it easiest to print that image out the size you want your quilt to be. So if you look real carefully on my paper here, I've got let's see one, two, three and a half by one, two, three. I've got about 12 sheets of paper that were consumed in printing this out. You could always take it down to like a kinkos and have it printed large if you needed if you don't want to waste your paper in ink, but that's how I do it is I get it full size and I printed out using the software in my printer. There's another one called posterizer that's a fantastic software that's also free. Get it to the actual size, get it flipped over and let it print out on either draft quality or let it print out in kind of a grainy or posterized or some sort of a filter that makes it less than perfect. I've got another example I'll show you where you really see that greeniness coming a lot. Now, once you have it printed backwards to the right size, you're going to simply look for the major lines and those major lines become the applique pieces. So I'm going to start with an obvious one. We've got our mountain here. So I'm going to sharpie on the outline. I'll worry about detail later. So here is the background of that mountain. And now I also see where there's kind of foothills that are almost blurry in front of it. So I'm going to run this down like that. And then over time, yes, I'm going to come back in here and I'm going to start to section out some of the more important pieces that will become highlights or shadows. So as I'm drawing these and I've done it so many times, it feels natural, but I want you to be thinking that these lines you're creating here represent new pieces of fabric, new colors of fabric. And probably a lot of you will be doing this with boutiques. So the motelling that happens, you don't have to draw like, look, you don't have to draw every little teeny line in there because you'll get that out of the modeling of your fabric or you can do it with thread. So once I start to section out my pieces, then I want to come in and label this. Like maybe this is going to be my white. So I'm going to do a W for white and W for white and W for white. I will give them numbers in a little bit. I'll get back to that, okay? Now, let's talk about some of these more intricate spots, more of these detailed spots. I want to deal with maybe some of this loop in in here, right? So I'm not going to draw each little circle because that would draw me nuts, drive me nuts. I'm already been drawn nuts. I'm going to trace this as a giant cluster and then I'm going to find the perfect fabric to cut as that one shape that becomes that flower in my quilt. You could also, of course, come back in and do the applique and the background using boutique of greens and other earth tones and then you could cut out actual flowers out of fabric as well, right? That would be really cool. So I'm just going to show you a few more of these. I'm drawing them in and maybe for this, I just want to put like an F for flower so I know that that will be my flower fabric I choose later. Some of this grass, I'm going to make a really generic piece that fits into the background and the way this particular photograph is translated, I see where I want to do maybe a couple of different shades. So I see over in here kind of this light to green coming through like this but over here is more of my darker, my medium green, right? Now the other thing you need to know about this is the line represents not one but two pieces of fabric. So let me finish this line so you know what that means. So what I'm saying is this line right here is going to be for the light, oh can I do an upside down G, I can, light green there but over here it's going to be my dark green on that side. So this line, when I get ready for the next step, will be actually traced twice. You're thinking yourself what's the next step, right? Well for that I actually start with my fusible web and of course I will do all of my detailing first or all of my tracing first but you don't probably have seven or eight hours to sit there while I goof around with this right. So now I'm going to go ahead and try to lay this down and if you have a light table at home this is a great time to be using your light table. So let me get you something that might show up a little bit better on camera. Now if I'm tracing this line here as I said and let me show you, I want to show you how two lines work together. So this is going to be, we're going to call this brown and over here was another white. So if I'm tracing that section here, now I'm going to go ahead, we're going to use as much or as little of our fusible web as possible, we're going to maximize our space. So here's going to be a brown and now that brown is going to be number one and now I come back in here I put a one there too. This over here is brown and I apologize for my sloppy upside down handwriting and that's going to be a two and then I'm going to position that on my fusible web right here where my brown number, oh can't do a backwards number two will be. The reason I'm putting numbers on them now is later on I'm going to iron this brown fusible web labeled fabric to the back of the brown fabric itself right and then I'm going to cut them out but I won't know where they go unless they now have a number. So the number is their name and it doesn't have to be an ordering system. I just start going through as I'm going sequentially so that I don't lose track and if I actually lost track it wouldn't matter too much anyways. So quick review and I'm going to show you another piece that will maybe make more sense as well. You've got your photograph, you've rendered it in your computer, you've printed it out to full size, you've done some of your tracing to capture the shapes or the different layers or elements within your photograph, you gave them a fabric label first and then you gave them a number later once you traced them on to the fusible web so you don't get lost right. Now check this out. This piece here, let me just slide this completely out of our way. This piece I'm about to show you, I'm preparing for a self portrait and this one I made really crazy in my computer and you can see how kind of blocky and grainy it is. So this was when I did some filters in the computer itself. Now this is a portrait and I've done lots with portraits. The key to portraits for applique is don't do too many pieces and don't do too many colors. So for this face portion I'm going to be thinking about five to six shades of whatever color family. So black to gray maybe I'm going to use here. So when I'm looking here I'm going to have my lightest. So this light right here I'm going to just start to label here that's my light there and then where I see it here there's another light and down here there's another light. So I'm just going to go through and do the exact same thing I did with my landscape when I'm doing my portraits. Now last thing it's incredibly important that when you're dealing with a portrait or an actual landscape that is a recognizable place like let's call it you know you know Semity where you have half dome in the background it's something like that Mount Rushmore. You really want to make sure that you have flipped or transposed that image first because if you don't do that with a person that we're supposed to recognize it's just going to look like they're cousin or their brother because their features won't be exact right. Now there's another fun trick when you're going to put it all back together and that is to actually if you're doing something very accurate like a face you could put a piece of Teflon over the top and you could build your applique itself right on top of that Teflon so you have real accuracy and that's where the light table really comes in handy is being able to illuminate your patterns from the underside as you go through. I know that seemed a lot like a talkestration for you but I hope you've got a couple of new skills and I wanted you to know that because I've got a bunch of fun applique quilt you know patterns coming up and applique quilt tutorials coming up on man sewing very soon and I want you to have the skill so that you can follow along and enjoy the rest of what's going on here at Man Sewing.