Material

• favourite jacket pattern
• assorted jacket fabric
• appliqué fabrics
• pictures and designs for appliqué
• stabilizer – tear away
• steam a seam
• wash-away stabilizer
• scissors
• marker pen
• various decorative threads
• embroidery needle 75/11 – 90/14
• pins

Method

1. It seems like an enormous amount of work, but it looks more than it is. Coming up with the idea, finding the right fabrics took most of my time. The pictures of the tulips and the Dutch girl are from a children’s coloring book. These kinds of pictures are easily found on the internet. Even if you are not a talented drawer, you can make fantastic applications in a simple way by using these pictures.
2. Before I cut the motifs, I iron some Steam-a-seam on the back of the fabric. That makes it easier to cut and iron it onto the jacket. For the pictures, I used a transfer pen on a piece of paper and ironed them on the fabric as well.
3. First I sewed the shoulder seams of the jacket, these I topstitch with red, white and blue threads. Then the appliqué. This is the fun part! On the back of the jacket I made an appliqué of the Dutch girl. Originally she had some tulips in her hand but these I replaced with roses because there where roses printed on the fabric.
4. All appliqué designs are stitched with BSR because I want a superb result and since BSR makes sure all my stitches are equal, I am sure the result will be fantastic. For stitching the appliqué and topstitching the jacket, I used thicker threads. There will be more depth to the designs and the topstitching will really be on top of the fabric.
5. Finally I made a special 3D decoration. A flower, which was printed on the fabric. The only thing was, the flower was only half on the fabric. So I cut the flower two times and glued them on top of each other. The other flowers are made of tulle. Here I used water-soluble stabilizer. I drew the flower on the stabilizer and hooped it. The little flower is the heart of the flower. Then I filled the flower stitching little circles from the inside out. The circles each have a small overlap with the previous one. This makes it very stable.

What I love about BSR

1. The regular stitch length
2. The different soles you can click on. When I am doing some meandering work, I always use the little round foot, because I want to see where the needle points into the fabric. When doing appliqué, I use the little round foot with the small opening. When working with several layers, I use the transparent one because of its larger size and it slides smoothly over the fabric and because of its transparency I have a very clear view.
3. Success with many different types of fabrics.
4. With BSR you can sew freely in any direction at any speed. You can easily create all kinds of shapes.

Tip

To test the thread tension I draw a couple of numbered lines (1 to &) on a piece of fabric (same as the project). I start sew the first line with my upper thread tension on 1, then I change my tension to 2 and sew the zig-zag line. I continue to 6 and then I can immediately see what gives the best result. This sample I make with both the straight stitch as well as a zigzag stitch.