Frogs, Stitches, and Trapunto

Today my design wall is on the machine.

I stitched around all the fused frogs, then decided to do a little trapunto with the threadwork.  Normally, when one does trapunto, a piece of batting is placed behind the shape and stitched around.  Then the excess batting has to be oh-so-carefully trimmed away.  And sad is the snipper who snips too close and cuts a hole in the quilt while removing the excess.

There has to be a better way.  Especially with these small frogs and their tiny appendages.  So I tried ironing my freezer paper shape to the batting -- I'm using wool for these --and then cutting it out.  This worked fine until I tried to remove my stencil from the batting -- it didn't want to let go.

So I settled for just cutting out a rough shape.  I sprayed the back of the frog/quilt lightly with temporary adhesive; then, using the stitches around the shape as a guide, I placed my piece of batting on the back of the frog.

From the front, I did my thread sketching, but I did not stitch around the edge of the frog.  I stitched only the parts that would give my frog depth.  I used a couple of different colors of thread and my freemotion foot.  I was careful to feel the batting underneath with my hand to make sure it stayed in place as I stitched.

Here is a view of the backside -- with no trimming necessary.

Flush with my success, I tried another.

I like this method a lot -- the only tricky thing is to make sure that the batting doesn't get pushed aside when doing the thread work.  I ironed the batting before I cut out the shapes -- the flatter it was, the easier it was to cut into the shapes.  Next, I'll finish the other three frogs, then layer and quilt as usual.  I will stitch around the edges of the frogs then and there won't be any threads to try to stitch on top of or to remove.

To see what other people are doing today on their design walls, click here to go to Judy's blog.