A friend of a friend (Danielle) commissioned me to make her a cushion cover with an applique picture of a lotus flower on it. She provided the fabric but gave me free reign to come up with a design. What a fun project! I was quite impressed with how it turned out. I started from this picture:
And sketched out a basic pattern which looked something like this (only needed half as I wanted it to be symmetrical):
I cut out the pieces and laid them all out and it was looking really great, I was super excited.
Then I started sewing and realised a few things:
- I should’ve used interfacing on my base fabric because it was all wrinkling up and looking terrible.
- I needed to cut some pieces out much larger than the bit that would be showing, so that they could lay underneath other pieces – otherwise the green background would show through the flower petals.
- I had sewed a few pieces down first that should have been placed last
- I had sewed lots of seams that didn’t need sewing because they were going to be underneath other seams
So I decided to use that first attempt as a practice and work out exactly what to do and which bits to sew, and then do a final copy. Luckily Danielle gave me way more fabric than I actually needed. I also bought some stuff from the craft store which is like double sided interfacing, you cut it out to the size of your applique piece and you can iron it down first so it doesn’t shift at all when you sew it. This stuff is brilliant and I highly recommend it for anyone attempting applique, it makes the end result look so much more finished and professional. So then I interfaced my base fabric and started again, with much better success:
Oh, and I added some little French knots to the centre thingy which looked really cool, but I can’t take credit for that idea, Danielle suggested it when we were initially discussing the project. Here is the practice one for comparison, ha ha! It looks hilariously bad. Although to be fair, once I decided it was a practice I didn’t make much of an effort to sew it nicely.
Anyway, so then I sewed the real one all up with the piping Danielle provided around the edge. I found this by far the hardest part as I haven’t had much experience with piping before and it’s tricksy stuff. Keeps shifting around like the devil while you’re trying to sew it down – my corners were a bit wonky I think. Also I’m not sure about the dark green piping, it’s a bit TOO dark. But still, it looked ok.
The end result!
Anyway, she was very happy with it so that’s the main thing. Sometimes it’s hard when someone asks you to do something and they’ve got a picture in their head which they can’t really explain but whatever you do can never live up to it.
