Eye catching machine applique with the Brother NQ900

Yesterday on QUILTsocial, I showed you how to prep and fuse your applique pieces to make the center of our cute baby quilt. Today, we get to use the Brother NQ900 to do the machine applique!

Let’s select a stitch!

With 240 built-in sewing stitches, including 58 stitches that you can combine, it was hard to decide which stitch to start with!! Usually when I do machine applique, I use a blanket stitch because, let’s face it, my home sewing machine has a limited number of stitches available. But, after seeing the decorative stitches that Jean used on her tablerunner last month on QUILTsocial, I knew that this machine was going to give me WAY more options!

So, I decided on stitch #25 in the Utility Decorative Stitches grouping. Once I made my selection, the LCD screen showed me what the stitch was going to look like, AND which foot I should use – the N foot as shown on the left side of the screen.

I loaded a gray variegated thread into the top of the machine, placed a prewound bobbin of DecoBob in the bottom, and I was in business. I loved how this stitch looked on the edges of the elephant!

For the elephant’s ear, I decided on a stitch that looked like a slanted blanket stitch – #12 in the Utility Decorative Stitches group. This stitch needed the same foot, so no need to switch it out!

Here’s a close up of the stitch done with Fruitti #FT02 which is a blue and yellow variegated thread. Doesn’t it look awesome?

Since I’m such a blanket stitch nut, I decided that I better try out the NQ900 blanket stitch too! This stitch is #20 in the same group as the above two stitches and again uses foot N.

Here it is stitched on the outside edge of the balloon heart. I used Tutti #TU30 for this stitch and really like how it looks on the green checked fabric!

After stitching down all of the edges of the applique shapes, the next job was to stitch the antennae of the butterfly and the string for the balloon. I used an erasable marking tool to draw these lines onto the background fabric.

I wanted to mimic the look of hand embroidery, so I decided on zigzag stitch #10. The LCD screen showed that I needed to change to foot J, so I did that and then loaded a black thread into the top of the machine. I shortened the width and length of the stitch by pressing the “-” buttons under the width and length indicators on the screen.

Here’s a close up of the butterfly antennae – doesn’t that look great?

In total, I used six different decorative stitches to finish the machine applique on the quilt. I quite like how the quilt is progressing and can’t wait to start putting on the borders! Tomorrow, we’ll add all of the borders, and we’ll start machine quilting with the awesome Brother NQ900!