Why use a silicone pressing sheet for fusible applique

Assembling my fusible applique sunflowers

I spent last evening tracing, fusing and cutting out petals from my Northcott fabrics and I now have a total of 90. Hopefully, this will be enough, but if needed I can always make more!! Today I’m going to show you some great reasons to use a silicone pressing sheet for fusible applique.

After I finished cutting out all of my petals I looked at the garbage pail and saw how many large fabric scraps were left that had fusible web fused to the backs of them. So, I decided to freehand cut a bunch of small petals from the scraps. I ended up with quite a few. Maybe after I’ve finished my art quilt I’ll be able to do something with them!!

Now that all of the petals had been cut, I needed to pull the fabric off the backs of each of the pieces. This should be fairly easy, but if you’re having trouble, just score the paper with a pin to give you something to grab on to.

I used two plates from my cupboard as the template for the sunflower centers. The two plates that I chose were 8” in diameter and 10½” in diameter. I traced their outlines onto my fusible web and then fused these circles onto the back of each of my brown Artisan Spirit Shimmer fabrics.

After cutting out the circles I realized just how PERFECT these two fabrics were for sunflower centers!!

Using the silicone pressing sheet

The next step was to assemble the sunflowers on top of my silicone pressing sheet. The beauty of using one of these sheets is that you can assemble parts of your applique design separately and then press the assembled unit to the background later. This lets you fuse small pieces together to make a larger unit, or as in my case, fuse together an image that has lots of parts before you fuse it to the background.

I placed my large circle onto the silicone sheet right side up and then arranged some of the larger petals around the edge, tucking them under the circle about ½”.

Next I added a second layer of petals on top of the first, again tucking the ends under the circle.

Moving it to the ironing board

Once the sunflower was to my liking, I moved the silicone pressing sheet (slowly) to my ironing board. I could have assembled it on my ironing board to begin with, but I wanted a larger flat area where I could see it better.

Using my hot, dry iron, I started to press around the edge of the brown circle to fuse the petals to the flower center. It doesn’t matter that the tips of the petals hang over the edge of the silicone sheet, because  I’m only concerned with pressing near the center of the circle to fuse all of the pieces together.

Once the fabric has cooled, the entire flower can be pulled off of the silicone sheet.

OMG – I LOVE IT!!!

Since I have a lot of small petals left, I took one of the bowls out of my cupboard and traced it to make a 6” circle for a third sunflower center. I repeated the above process with the smaller brown circles to assembling two more fusible applique sunflowers.

Now I need to decide which of the two Artisan Spirit Shimmer background fabrics I’m going to use. Since the flowers are all fused together it’s super easy to just audition them on the two different fabrics.

So I’ve got my two backgrounds down on the floor of my studio and I’m auditioning my sunflowers on top of each one. Although I love the red fabric, I really think the “Autumn” one works better for this project. Autumn (brown) Artisan Spirit Shimmer background it is!

Adding scrappy borders

I want the stems and leaves of the sunflowers to extend off of the background onto the border, so I’m going to cut the background a little smaller than I usually would – 40” x 32” looks like it would work well.

Next, I’m going to add a scrappy border around the background using 4½” wide strips that I’ve cut from all of the gold/yellow fabrics. I’ve cut two or three strips from each fabric and they range in size from 4” to 12” long. I sewed them together end to end randomly to make one long strip.

I cut two borders from this strip that were each 32” long. One was sewn to each of the two shorter sides of the background fabric. Once these borders were sewn on, I measured the width of the quilt and cut two more borders that same measurement. These were sewn to the top and bottom of the quilt. I like how these borders turned out!! It’s good that they carry the gold/yellows out to the edge of the quilt and they are wide enough to provide a nice frame for the background!

Now that the borders are on, tomorrow I’m going to fuse all of my elements onto the background and start quilting. After today, I hope you agree that there are lots of great reasons to use a silicone pressing sheet for fusible applique.