Can anything be more fun than Stacking Stitches??

Creating designs with the stitches on the PFAFF quilt expression 720 is slowly turning me into an ’embellish-er’. What can I say? I haven’t found a stitch I don’t like!

In yesterday’s post, I completed my quilter’s name badge. For that project, I tried out one of four alphabet fonts included on this machine and used the floating stitches technique. In this post, I’ll show you some of the stacking stitches that are available on this machine too!

The stacking stitches are located in menu 8 along with the floating stitches and the ribbon stitches – we’ll look at those another time. You also need to use stabilizer with these stitches and the #8 presser foot.

Remember, once you select a stitch, the Color Touch Screen will display icons that tell you which accessories to use. If you’re ever unsure, you can press the question mark beside the screen then tap on an icon; a popup will show on the screen explaining what the icon represents. Then you can look further in the manual if you need any more instructions, but honestly, after a few times, the icons make it easy to just look up and know what you need to do to stitch successfully.

After browsing through the two screens of stacking stitches I knew I had to try out the fungi! I realized that the stacking stitches are somewhat set up as pairs, so I chose to add the grass stitches to see what they looked like together.

The one tip that I followed from the manual is to make sure to start both stitching lines at the same place on the fabric. To do this, I used the red guide marks on the presser foot and lined it up with the top edge of my fabric each time.

I’m pretty pleased with the results!

Cute, right?! Next, I had to try one of the stacking stitches that reminds me of paisleys. I think it looks good all by itself.

Of course, I couldn’t stop there! I discovered that one of the stitches is a sewing needle with thread. After I stitched out a line of that, I stitched one sequence then added the word ‘thread’ after it.

Then I tried another stitch and made a sequence of words to go underneath it too.

I’ll give you a closer look of the cat stacking stitch because it inspired me to create something for my daughter.

I used a brown thread on the spindle and black thread in the bobbin. We have a Siamese cat so I thought this would make a cat that somewhat looked Siamese.

Then I added some cat-inspired words! I may or may not have been having a lot of fun at this point. I really liked that I could just think of something I would like to add to my project and that I could easily do it with this machine. I didn’t have to change to an embroidery hoop to get these results!

I decided to use these rows of stitches and turn them into a coaster for my daughter because she loves cats. She also loves to drink tea so I thought a coaster instead of a mug rug was in order. I trimmed my fabric into a  5″ long strip and searched in my scrap bin for some fabrics to go with my brown cat on pink grunge fabric. 

To make it go quickly, I used the quilt-as-you-go technique of sewing the fabrics together while at the same time stitching the fabrics to batting. And I used some more floating stitches!

I only used them to sew one of the fabrics to the pink fabric because the third fabric happily already had brown accents in it. Then it was simply a matter of putting a piece of backing fabric right sides together with my top fabric and using the envelope method to create the coaster.

I topstitched with brown thread and very quickly had a completed tea coaster.

I had a lot of fun this week exploring some of the stitching techniques on the PFAFF quilt expression 720. The stacking stitches offer a lot of creative possibilities for quilters. I really enjoyed sampling a few and then creating a coaster too. Come back again next week to discover some more creativity here at QUILTsocial.