Applique on Silk
 

I am working on a wall quilt where I want to applique leaves onto silk gauze. These leaves would only be pointed ovals.

Is this even possible?
What technique could, would or do you use?

Julie

What type of fabric will the leaves be? What size? the thing that pops into my mind is that if the fabric used for the leaves is much heavier than the silk, the gauze will not provide enough support. The smaller the leaves are, the less this is going to be an issue. Personally, I would do hand turned or raw edge hand applique with silk thread. Sounds like something you need to experiment with a bit.

The leaves will be the lightest fabric that will work. I am going to start with them being the same silk gauze but may have to go to a slightly firmer fabric. The leaves are going to be approx. 2" long by 1" wide tapering at the ends. I definately need to experiment with it; but, was just wondering if it was even possible.

I know you can applique silk on silk; I saw examples of this in China. Of course I can't find my big book on applique right now to see if it address this. I would say experiment.

Good luck, it will be beautiful. I won't even hazard a guess as to how to help you, but it does sound lovely. Please share when finished.

I wish you good luck too. Sounds intriguing.

If it were me I would definitely hand stitch the leaves, I would also place a fine piece of muslin or similar behind the leaf to add some structure to the silk particularly if I were using a different fabric to the silk.

One of my friends made a silk quilt, and she found that she got the best results by fusing the lightest weight interfacing she could find onto the fabric. I have never used silk in a quilt top (though I did win 6 FQs, which look very pretty on my shelf), so any advice I could give you is second- or third-hand.