Art Quiltie with stamped fabric

On my Fabric Postcard group we are having an art quiltie swap.  There was one in June and I missed it!!!!!  Fortunately, I am blessed to have a member of the group that volunteered to swap one for one with me so I made her this cute little quiltie!!
I started with a square of stamped fabric which I received in a swap a while back.  I love the quote so I cut the fabric piece down to 4" x 4" for the front of my quiltie.  I found and installed my free motion foot for my sewing machine.  It was not working properly so I found a YOUTube video that gave me a visual of the process and a few hints on how to best proceed with free motion stitiching.  Once reinstalled and the adjustments made it was working much better.  I layered my square over a piece of batting and started stitching.  You can see from the photo that my free motion skills are only in the beginner stages but I did manage to go around the petals on the flowers that were stamped on the fabric.  I will keep practicing!!

Next I stitched my backing fabric (4"x 4") to a scrap piece of fabric and used the same technique to embellish the swirls on it.  Next, I found some coordinating pink embroidery floss and added double sequins (iridescent white and fuchsia) to the center of the flowers and secured them in place using a ivory seed bead.  I added three more stitched flowers in the same floss and added fuchsia sequins and ivory beads to their centers. as well.  Then, I laid my front on my back and trimmed them to the same size and added a few more loops of free motion stitching to secure these two piece together.  With that much complete, I changed my foot back to the one for regular stitching and zigzagged all the way around very close to the edge to create a nice neat edge.

I have been playing with the idea of making fabric tape using fusible webbing for a while.   So, today, I decided to play and made some fabric tape to bind the edges of my quiltie.
I positioned a strip of fusible webbing (sold to fix a hem without sewing) on the edge of a coordinating solid, enclosed it in resist paper and ironed it.  The fusible webbing very nicely adhered to the edge of the fabric.  I trimmed away the piece with fusible webbing on it and I had created a length of fabric tape!  I cut a four inch length and positioned it neatly on one side of my quiltie with half the tape on the quiltie and the other half hanging off.

I place resist paper over and above and ironed it in place.  It fused very nicely to the front portion of my quiltie. Next, I turned the quiltie over and ironed the remainder to the back which very neatly bound that side of the quiltie. I cut another 4" strip and positioned it on the opposite side and repeated the steps to bind that edge.
To finish it off, I cut another two strips but made sure they were long enough to cover the strips I had already put in place, trimmed the corners into a point so that the corners would look mitered and adhered them in the same fashion as I had done the other two sides.

You can see how the binding looked in position before I ironed down the final edge to the back of my quiltie.  It worked very well and created some very nice corners on my little quiltie.   I decided to add a row of straight stitching very close to the inside edge and the outside edge of my binding to help secure it and to give the binding some texture and definition!! I am very happy with how well this technique worked and will certainly be using it again when I am making quilties!!
So my quiltie is ready to go and will be off to my partner this week!!

Therese