Starting the Chicken Salad Sewalong

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I’ve had a few false starts with the Chicken Salad sewalong (affiliate Link)…

First I had to decide what type of applique to do… whether I would follow Lori’s method, or do raw edge….

Lori’s method is actually the first type of applique I did over 12 years ago… My sister asked me to make her a quilt, and I had never done applique before.. I was scared stiff of the thought of doing needle turn, and so thought – why don’t I just sew the shapes to some interfacing and turn them inside out….? And guess what? It worked and turned out beautifully, I think at least 🙂 :

So when I watched Lori’s tutorial I thought, yep, I’ll do that again… and proceeded to trace the shapes and start sewing them…

But you know what… after I’d turned a few around, I didn’t like them… See the shapes in the quilt above are quite large and therefore very easy to turn. But these chook ones are smaller and I think my interfacing is too thin… and when I turned them they didn’t look great….so I decided rather than go and buy other interfacing I would just do my usual raw edge applique (also because I have a whole roll of steam-a-seam that needs to be used up before it loses its stickiness).

So late last night I started tracing the shapes onto steam-a-seam…. and after I’d traced them all I realized (of course) that if I wanted them facing the same way as the pattern, I needed to flip the templates!!!

Today I came back to the studio and rubbed out all the shapes I drew last night, and third time lucky?

I hope so! They are all traced and ironed on,

…and it is getting late again… so I thought I’d take a break from tracing and ironing to put this blog post up…

Before I start cutting, I will pull the fabric and templates for the second block that went up on Monday, trace and iron them, and then I’ll have both lots of shapes to cut out while I’m watching some tv with DH….

As this is my first sewalong with Lori, I didn’t realize it was a block of the week! Silly me! So I am bound to get behind, but that’s ok – I love the quilts she is making and am going to try to do both of them…. even if I don’t manage to keep up with her.

In any case I’ve made a start!

I’m going to go trace a few more and then head for bed….

Sleep tight everyone!