I saw on one of Alex Anderson's shows where she likes to use spray starch in preparing her applique pieces. You have to be a member of The Quilt Show to see her piece about it, but I found a tutorial about it online. This is exactly the way Alex does it, and it really does work well. You can prepare either hand applique pieces or pieces to be machine appliqued. The only difference I see is that I use my mini iron and in the tutorial it looks like she's using a regular iron.
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