Button-Inspired Art Quilts with Applique and Free Motion Quilting

Are you amazed at what you can do with a bit of roving and an embroidery machine? I love the felted cushion cover project from yesterday!

I mentioned that I’m developing a fetish for buttons! In fact, the inspiration for today’s project came from a pack of buttons called Life’s a Zoo by Dress It Up.

I was recently in Africa, and had the good fortune to see all the animals in person that were in the package. OH MY! That gives me an idea! I could make a small art quilt to remind me of the trip! And the rest is history!

I put my thinking cap on to see how I could incorporate the buttons into my project. I don’t use patterns for this type of project, and often I don’t even know what it’ll look like until the end! It’s so much fun to have total freedom to play with supplies and let the piece grow on its own.

I’ll walk you through some of the steps I took to show you how I work. I found this frame at the thrift store and thought it would be perfect as a base. However, I had to abandon that idea because it turned out to be too small. And I’m glad because I like my quilt even better. And QUILTsocial is a quilting blog, afterall!

Plan B was to search my fabric stash for fabrics that would make a good “Serengeti” landscape. Notice, these are nothing special – just a range of blenders!

I happened to be browsing in a fabric shop and lucked out by finding this African-themed fabric. Oh my!! How can I incorporate this into my project? I bought this fabric way before I pulled the other fabrics from my stash. I bought one meter,  just in case!

I ended up not using the Twill Tape, as sometimes less is more, but I’ll be using it tomorrow!

I found a pattern for the tree and reduced it to fit my wall hanging. If I reduced it even further to fit in the frame, it wouldn’t have worked. To get the background, I just used three strips for the sky and one for the ground.

I laid out the buttons to see how the scale worked, and everything looks good. The piece is approximately 18″ square. How do I come up with this? I used the tree as my reference point. I laid the tree out on the cutting mat, then got out a ruler and measured to see how deep and wide a background I needed. I literally trust my gut, and it’s mostly right on!

I used a HeatnBond Lite fusible web on the back of the tree and other elements in the wall hanging.

The next step was to do some appliqué stitching. I love using fusible web for appliqué, but am not a fan of leaving the edges raw. I used a small buttonhole (blanket) stitch. And I got out my assortment of Gütermann Thread to find matching thread colors.

It looks like it’s time to replace the one on the left, which is cotton. We chatted about thread types earlier this week. The one on the right is polyester thread, and I have many spools of it as well. When I do appliqué, I pick based on color, not on the thread type. Both work equally well, and it gives me a lot of variety. I like using matte thread for the blanket stitch rather than the shiny thread I use for satin stitch.

Remember to use your open-toe appliqué foot! You can see so much better, and before I knew it, the appliqué was complete!

I wanted to use the African-themed fabric as a background for the buttons by fussy-cutting the fan shape.

I placed a piece of fusible web on the back of the fabric, covering five complete shapes. Then I took my applique scissors and cut the fans out.

The center part of the motif was a bit busy for showcasing the animal buttons, so I added a piece of brown to ide the busy print. You can see that the fan behind the monkey has a brown backing, while the elephant does not. Was it necessary? Perhaps not, but since it’s my piece, I can do what I want with it!

I positioned the shapes on the background, eyeballed the location, and fused them in place. A ruler helped ensure the shapes were straight, but, as I mentioned earlier, trust your gut! If you don’t like it, then find a new position for the shapes!

Once the shapes were fused, I used the blanket stitch to appliqué them in place. I LOVE the look!

I grabbed some batting scraps (Quilter’s 80/20 Quilting Batting) left over from a previous project. Keep those scraps in the bag, or at least label them by size, because when you want small pieces, it’s so easy to find them.

Since this is a wall hanging, some quilting was necessary. I’m a bit rusty with quilting on the domestic machine, so I got out some paper and doodled to warm up and test a design.

YES, for this type of background fill, I start at the BOTTOM and work my way up. Why? Because then it’s easy to see where I’ve quilted, because it’s in front of the needle, not behind, as would happen if I started at the top and worked down. The doodling helped limber me up, and I was off.

I set up the machine for free-motion quilting by attaching the appropriate foot and selecting FREE-MOTION on the PFAFF creative icon 2. I got out my quilting gloves and used the extension table, and I was good to go.

Make sure you leave a little extra backing and batting on all four sides, so you have something to hang onto as you approach the edges.

Next, I trimmed the quilt so I could add a hanging sleeve to the back. If you need a refresher on adding a hanging sleeve, check out this blog post, 2 questions before you sew binding by machine.

Then I bound the quilt and used the sewing machine to sew the entire binding on. Here’s a link to help if you need it, Binding a Quilt.

The final step was to add the buttons. These are shank buttons, as we saw with the bee buttons earlier this week. I debated sewing or gluing the buttons on, but I liked the idea of the buttons lying flat on the fan shape, so hot glue it was! They are adorable!!! Using my little cutting tool, I removed the shank and hot-glued them on.

And here is the final project! Oh MY!!!!! I LOVE IT! And to think that this came about because of a small pack of buttons! Sometimes we overthink things. At other times, we are paralyzed by choices or by the need for direction. I like to make things up as I go and let my creativity guide me. Don’t listen to others or your internal voice! Just let your hands create!

I hope you enjoyed this little trip down inspiration lane. I now have a fabulous wall hanging as a reminder of my vacation. And those googly eyes on the Dress It Up – Life’s A Zoo animal buttons add a touch of whimsy that’s so much fun!

How many times have I mentioned that I have a button fetish? Well, guess what? Tomorrow’s project also starts with a button! Be sure to come back to see what I do with that – it’s totally different!

Have a wonderful day!

Ciao!!!

This is part 4 of 5 in this series

Go back to part 3: Free Form Felting with Wool Roving Using Machine Embroidery