jillmc

I am making the pattern Sunflowers and Flying Geese. After needleturning the first outer circle onto the background, I tried reverse applique for the first time, and it worked beautifully!
My problem is the inner circle. There is no background and in spite of stay stitching, it still is causing me grief and lots of unstitching. I tried pressing under the seam allowance and hand stitching, facing a circle and machine appliquéd with invisible thread....and I am still not pleased. Any suggestions? Thank you!

MarionsQuilts

what problem exactly are you facing?

jillmc

Marion, I am struggling with appliquing the center circle with no background fabric behind it.

feline fanatic

I too am confused as to what your issue is. Do you plan on doing the inner circle like reverse applique? (IOW you are turning under the sunflower and appliqueing that to a smaller background square?) What issues are you having? I think either way, whether you applique a small circle to the center or reverse applique the block to a small background square, lots of starch and glue will be your friend.

Your blocks are beautiful.

Edited to add, you may want to look into the technique known as applipiecing. There are some you tube videos out there. Sharon Schambers calls it Piecelaque and Caroly Bryer Fallert calls it applipiecing. I think it might help you. If you subscribe to The Quilt Show both techniques are shown there.

juliasb

I cannot see a single flaw. Many times the quilter (you) will see things that no one else sees. If this is not a quilt for a quilt show I would not be concerned. The circles look perfect to me.

Grace creates

I would iron the circle on freezer paper, letting a little seam allowance hang over the freezer paper. Baste a running stitch along the seam allowance adding a few snips so it can fold over nicely. Hope I explained that clearly. Just sew it on with a blind hem stitch after.

MarionsQuilts

So the idea of applique is to sew fabric onto other fabric ... I don't think this technique will help you since you aren't really doing that ... I'm not sure what the technique would be called, but if you can find what it's called, then you will probably get some better ideas on what to do.

The only thing I can think of is to put fabric in the back and then applique your inner circles to the back. This would work, if you aren't going to see the back, but if you are going to see the back, then no, this won't work.

Good luck, and I hope you get some help!

Barb in Louisiana

Your blocks are beautiful. We are our own worst critic when it comes to piecing and quilting. But, for the inner circles, this is the method I would use. NOTE: I would test this first on other fabric first, just in case you hate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK4Wv1l61J0

Edited to add:
The beauty of this method is that your pieced part will be up to you so you should be able to tell that you are not cutting off any points.
One thing he did that I would not do is to iron the seam open. I would iron it to the inside of the circle so that your pieced outer edge can lay flat. Your outer circle already has enough seams and you don't really want to have to notch into it to get the outer part to lay flat by cutting into your seam allowance.

ThreadHead

I would use a light weight Tricot. sew it in a circle on your fabric, turn it and sew it down. You can cut the inside of the tricot circle out if you want to.

jillmc

Thanks for the replies....guess I am not conveying my issue very well....
The inside of the block needs a circle appliquéd to make the center of the block. The white pieced diamonds leave an unstable perimeter, and my circles get wonky if I try to make sure the white points do not get compromised. I have staystitched them, but it doesn’t really seem to help. Maybe I can baste some fabric to the backside of the sunburst, applique the center circle through the additional layer, and then cut the added fabric away from the back side.
Thanks for letting me think out loud! I am probably making this more difficult than it is.