Pat, I.use the same method with starch but find the template plastic to be slippery, especially with wet starch on it.
The solution I’ve found is to use bakery cardboard. It has a waxy side that resists the wet starch for a little while.
I just made 18 perfectly round circles that way. The big pain was lining them, so the background didn’t show through. Ugh.
I machine- sewed around them with the Juki, using the new short compensating foot. You can barely see the stitching.
Because it was for a baby, though,I did other rows of stitching, too.
charlotte