Free-motion Appliqué

If you have an electric sewing machine then you can learn to use free-motion stitching to appliqué fabric motifs onto a background. This is a great way to embellish bags, zipped pouches like those above, shirts, gadget cases, cushions, household linens, kids’ clothing or just about anything else, while using up small scraps that would otherwise be wasted. You will need to practise first, but it shouldn’t take long to get the hang of the free-motion technique.

1. Electric sewing machine
2. Embroidery/darning foot (not essential)
3. Feed dog cover (aka darning plate) for sewing machines without feed dogs that can be dropped
4. Scraps of lightweight cotton fabric in plain colours or with a small pattern
5. Larger pieces of plain cotton fabric for the background
6. Bonding powder, fusible bonding web or fusible tape (aka no-sew hemming tape)
7. Embroidery hoop at least 6” / 15cm in diameter
8. Removable fabric marker pen (eg Frixion) or washable felt tip pen
9. Small sharp scissors, pins, sewing machine needles and thread
10. Tracing paper and pencil
11. Iron, preferably a steam iron
12. Safety glasses (unless you wear glasses anyway for sewing)
13. Fabric glue or PVA (white glue) and a small brush - optional

Ordinarily, a sewing machine’s presser foot pushes the fabric down onto the feed dogs which have little teeth that grip the underside of the fabric and move it past the needle. The sewist merely has to guide the fabric very lightly while the feed dogs do the work. What’s more, they work in co-ordination with the up and down motion of the needle bar such that they only pull the fabric forward while the needle is out of it. When the needle is piercing the fabric, the fabric doesn’t move – if it did, the needle would very likely bend or break, as often happens when a sewing machine’s timing is out and the needle and feed dogs are no longer working in perfect synchronisation.

Free-motion stitching is different from ordinary machine sewing because the feed dogs are taken out of the equation, either by dropping them below the throat plate – if the machine allows it, and most modern machines do – or by covering them up so that they can no longer grip the fabric and move it. If a presser foot is used - and it isn't essential - it will be a foot designed for free motion work that doesn’t press down firmly (or at all) on the fabric, because it doesn’t need to make the fabric engage with the teeth of the feed dogs. The fabric motion is instead provided entirely by the sewist, whose hands will manoeuvre an embroidery hoop holding tightly stretched fabric past the needle.

You may be wondering how on earth anyone can co-ordinate their hand movements with the up and down action of the needle, unless they are stitching very slowly indeed. In practice, as long as you follow the free-motion mantra of “slow hands, fast foot”, it will work. By that I mean you must put your foot down on the pedal to drive the machine fast while moving the hooped fabric relatively slowly. This is tricky to master, because the natural inclination when doing something unfamiliar on a sewing machine is to take it steady. Instead you need to run your machine fast because you will break needles if you yank on the fabric while the needle is in it, and the slower you run the machine the more time the needle spends piercing it with every stitch.

So what we’re going to do first is hoop up some fabric and practise. Then we can move on to the appliqué stage.

Take a piece of plain coloured, lightweight cotton or polycotton fabric, preferably in a pale colour, and cut or tear a square that’s bigger than your embroidery hoop by about 1½” / 4cm all round. I use curtain lining or old sheeting for these practice pieces, avoid anything with a loose weave. Iron the fabric smooth. Take the hoop apart and lay the inner ring down on a table. Place the fabric square on it, right side down. Then put the outer ring over the inner ring, easing it down with the fabric trapped between the two rings. Tighten the tensioning screw a little, but not so much that it grips too tight to make any adjustments.

Now turn the hoop over and work your way around the edge, holding the inner ring down onto the table with the finger tips of one hand while pulling up on the excess fabric from outside the hoop with the other hand, right next to where you’re pushing the ring down. Pull vertically up on the fabric to get the most movement. Adjust the tensioning screw as needed to be able to slide the fabric between the two rings when you pull without it slipping back again when you move to the next zone. Work around the ring like a clock face, 12 o’clock and then across to 6 o’clock, then 3 and 9, 2 and 8, and so on. Keep an eye out for any distortion in the fabric which indicates you’ve been pulling it unevenly.

When you think you’ve got the fabric as taut as possible, tighten the screw fully, turn the hoop over and try lightly tapping the fabric in the middle of the hoop. It should not only look a bit like a tambourine but also make a percussived noise, albeit a fairly quiet one. If it doesn’t, slacken the screw a little, turn the hoop over and try to pull some more fabric out of the ring. It’s worth getting it really tight, you don't want the fabric to be pulled up as the needle rises since that means the needle will be piercing it for longer in each stitch cycle, increasing the chance of the needle snapping or bending.

Now you have a hoop of fabric ready to practise on, turn your attention to your sewing machine and its instruction book. (No instruction book? Google your machine’s make and model plus the phrase “free motion”, someone will probably have made a video showing what needs to be done.) Lower the feed dogs or fit the cover plate, whichever is appropriate. Fit an embroidery foot, free motion foot or darning foot – it should look something like the one in the photo above with a little ring, or else like the “open toe” type with a horseshoe shape for better visibility shown in the photo of the appliqué being stitched in Step 7. Some feet are spring-loaded, which is more important for quilting or stitching lots of layers but not needed for a thin fabric stretched taut in a hoop.

If you don’t have a foot like this, don’t worry, it’s perfectly possible to manage without a presser foot at all, but you will need to take a little extra care not to let your fingers get too close to the needle.

It’s helpful to start with a needle that won’t break easily, so don’t use anything smaller than a size 14 / 90. Once you know what you’re doing you can use a finer one if that’s better suited to the weight of the fabric. Use any sewing thread of a reasonable quality for both the top thread and the bobbin, but its colour should make a good contrast with the fabric.

Now slide your hooped fabric under the fully raised needle, with the taut fabric downwards. You will probably need to raise the presser foot to do so, possibly even lifting it manually a little higher than the lever allows. Tipping the hoop at an angle should help to get it under the needle, but if there’s still not enough room then remove the foot temporarily and replace it once the hoop is in position. Make sure you lower the presser foot lever afterwards, even if you haven’t got a presser foot fitted. The foot won't necessarily touch the surface of the fabric, which is OK.

Set the machine to a straight stitch, ie a stitch width of zero. There’s no need to bother about stitch length because it’s your hand movements that will determine that, so just leave it however it’s set.

Electronic machines can be set to stop either with the needle fully up or fully down. Choose fully up for now if you have such a machine.

Finally, I recommend wearing a pair of safety specs if you don’t need glasses to sew, because there’s a small chance a broken needle could fly into your face. Wearing protection will give you the confidence to put your foot down.

Start with the needle positioned somewhere in the middle of the hoop. Turn the handwheel towards you to bring the needle fully down into the fabric, then raise the needle while pulling gently on the tail of the needle thread to bring a loop of bobbin thread up. Catch the loop with a pin and pull the thread free of the surface of the fabric. This removes any possibility that the bobbin thread tail could get snarled up underneath when you sew over it later. Put the upper and lower threads together and hold them lightly with a finger while you take a few stitches – without moving the hoop at all – to secure them. Then rest your hands on the bed of the machine, one at each side, with your fingers on the edge of the hoop ready to move it. It should stay in contact with the bed of the machine at all times, you will just slide it around.

Now you’re ready to start. Push the foot controller down to run the machine at a moderate to fast speed and then SLOWLY move the hoop about an inch towards you before smoothly moving it to the left, then to the back, then to the right. Then try stitching other shapes and mix things up by rotating the hoop one way or another as well as doing sideways and back-front movements. Aim for curves rather than straight lines and corners. If you feel uncomfortable at any point or something goes wrong, remember to stop moving your hands before you take your foot off the pedal. And when you restart, press the pedal an instant before you start moving the hoop.

Have look at the tension, the bobbin thread shouldn't be visible in the surface. Adjust the needle thread tension if necessary, better that a little of the top thread should be visible underneath than the other way around.

Spend half an hour or so getting familiar with moving the hoop. We’re all more used to making patterns by moving a pencil across stationary paper, but this is the reverse – the needle stays put while the fabric moves past it, and that takes a bit of getting used to. Notice that, if you’re using an embroidery foot, it may stick out more at the back than the front (or vice versa), meaning that you can’t pull the hoop too far towards you or the back of the foot will hit the hoop. However, you can still stitch quite close to the hoop just by rotating it so that you are now approaching the zone in question from a different direction. Also notice that the stitch length varies according to how fast you were moving the hoop at the time. For an appliqué project a short stitch length (slow hands!) will secure the fabric better than long stitches, which is fortunate because you’re more likely to break the needle if you move fast. But don't let the stitches get too short or they will look lumpy and messy and you may even make a hole in the fabric.

If you find you are breaking needles, try gritting your teeth and running the machine faster. This feels wrong, but trust me, “slow hands, fast foot” is the way to go. Maybe have a break and start afresh after a cup of tea, concentrating hard for a while can be tiring.

Once you feel you can move around the hoop freely, start with a new piece of fabric in the hoop but this time draw some shapes on it first with a pencil and follow them with your stitching. I suggest shapes like ovals, flowers and triangles. It feels natural to stitch with the fabric moving away from you towards the back of the machine, because that’s what we normally do, but force yourself to move the hoop in all directions necessary to follow a wiggly line rather than constantly rotating the hoop so that the stitches are always running in the direction away from you. As long as you are confident that you are always keeping your hands still an instant before stopping the machine, set it to stop with the needle down if you can, to give the option of pivoting at corners.

The appliqué technique I show in this Instructable doesn’t require accuracy in stitching, part of its charm is that the appliquéd fabric has outlines which look like they’ve been scribbled as a small child might do, going repeatedly over the same line. Practise doing that, stitching 2 or 3 times more over lines that you’ve already sewn, but don’t aim for absolute precision. When you come to tackling the appliqué you’ll find that going over existing lines again is really helpful because it enables you to get out of “dead ends” in the design without having to cut the threads and start sewing in a new place.

The “outlines” don’t even need to stay within the individual shapes, they can wander off now and again, so you don’t need to achieve perfection when following the marked lines on your test piece. But when you can follow them reasonably well and are comfortable with moving the hoop in all directions, you’re ready to move on to practising the actual design you’re intending to appliqué. First you must choose a design.

For your first attempt at free motion appliqué, choose something simple that has a clear outline without any areas within it that don’t touch the outline. In other words, if you were going to draw around all the individual areas of the design, it should be possible to do that without lifting the pencil from the paper – although you are allowed to cheat a little by making small “bridges” between different areas, like where I've taken a line up from the car's door to the front window in the photo above. Also, avoid anything with perfect circles in it because they are hard to get right. My first attempt was the VW Beetle, which wasn’t a wise choice because the wheel and tire outlines are circles that are disconnected from the rest of the car. The sailing boat I did next was better option. It makes use of a line of stitching (the mast) on the background fabric as well as on the appliquéd shapes, which is fine.

Either draw something yourself, trace an image from a magazine or do an online search for images by entering “simple outline of a …” in a search engine where the missing word is bird, boat, flower, fish, house, car or whatever you fancy. Think about the fabric scraps you have and what they might be suitable for. Avoid any images which have more than say 4 or 5 discrete areas, especially if the areas are small – it will be fiddly to cut them out, apply them and stitch around them. The size of the design you use will be constrained by the size of your hoop, you should have a pretty good idea by now how much of a gap inside its edge you’ll need to leave.

Even if you’ve drawn the design yourself, I suggest photographing it then you can display it on a computer or tablet screen and easily alter its size. Also, you can use the screen as a light box by turning up its brightness to full and then tracing the outlines onto a piece of tracing paper or even printer paper. Trace it twice, one pattern will be used for the individual pieces while the other will be left entire to get the overall composition right.

Cut around the outer edge of one pattern with a small pair of scissors. From the other one, carefully cut out the individual shapes that will be needed. This will vary according to the design. For example, my VW Beetle has a background of the flowery green fabric onto which I’ve overlaid the two wheels and two windows. So all I needed to cut out was one wheel (because they are identical) and both windows. In contrast, my sailing boat needed 4 individual shapes: the two sails, the hull and the pennant on top of the mast. To avoid confusion, number any similar shapes and mark the same numbers on the entire pattern.

Before starting the appliqué, stitch a final test piece using your chosen design. This will identify any tricky areas that you might want to re-design, and it will also help to develop some muscle memory that should make the appliqué stitching go more smoothly. Draw around the outline of the entire pattern piece on another test square using a heat-removable pen, a water-soluble crayon or child’s washable felt tip, then draw around the individual pattern pieces to mark in where they will go. Draw on any additional lines, such as the doors and wheel arches of the Beetle and the boat’s mast. You might be able to see where they go by holding the fabric against the pattern on a window or laptop screen, otherwise just draw them in by hand. Hoop up the fabric, have a think about where is best to start (spoiler alert - usually where two or more lines intersect) and then give it a go. Remove the marking lines by ironing or washing when you’ve finished and give the test piece a good press before you evaluate it.

The Beetle above stitched in red was my test piece for that design. The lines are a little wobbly, I‘ve missed a bit at the back, and the wheels and tires are far from round – like I said before, circles are best avoided – but it is recognisably a Beetle. The good news is, once fabric pieces are appliquéd on they will help to draw the eye away from any imperfections in the stitching. It’s time to start the actual appliqué.

Even if you’ve been practising with polycotton fabrics, I suggest using pure cotton for the actual project because it’s more forgiving for beginners. The fabric you use, both for the background and the motif, must be fully shrunk otherwise differential shrinkage could cause wrinkling when the finished article is washed in the future. Press everything with a hot steam iron (or an ordinary iron with a damp cloth) if in any doubt. While you’re at it, test the removability of whatever pen or crayon you are going to use to mark the lines that are going to be stitched. (It isn’t necessary to draw lines around the edges of the shapes, only where stitching needs to be added somewhere other than around the edge, like the doors and wings of my VW Beetle.)

Use the pattern pieces to cut out fabric shapes and also shapes from bonding web if you are going to use it. No-sew hemming tape is easy to find in the shops and cheaper than buying a big piece of the fusible web that is meant for appliqué work, and for small shapes it's perfectly adequate. For these small pattern pieces I find it easy enough to cut around them just by holding them on the fabric or web. If you must draw around them first, do so lightly in pencil on the back of the fabric, or use a heat-removable pen. Think about which way any design on the fabric should run to suit the composition.

You can, if you wish, stop the fabric shapes from fraying by applying PVA (aka white glue, school glue) or specialist fabric glue to their edges with a small brush. Hold each piece in turn between your finger and thumb and apply glue all around the very edge, then let it dry without the edge touching anything. I did this on the Beetle while I left the edges untouched on the sailing boat and they are much more ragged. Whichever look you prefer is up to you, but glue must be fully dry before proceeding. Once it is, trim off any straggling threads.

Bond the individual pieces onto the background fabric using bonding powder or fusible web, following the manufacturer’s instructions. Where some pieces are layered on top of others (eg the wheels and windows of the Beetle), just do it in stages. Then fix the fabric in the hoop and get ready for free-motion stitching.

Choose your stitching thread with care. I recommend cotton thread so that you can press it with a hot steam iron afterwards, which will give a more professional look to the finished work. A thread colour that contrasts well with the fabrics is the best choice, because it makes the slightly uneven stitching appear deliberate. Compare the two photos above of the Beetle, the first with yellow stitching and the second after I’d overstitched with black, to see what I mean.

Depending on the thickness of your cotton fabrics and the number of layers, you might want to change the needle from a size 14/90 to a finer one, such as a 12/80.

Stitch away, going close to the edge of every piece of appliquéd fabric without being concerned if you wobble off the edge or too far inside it every now and again. Where you have such wobbles, don’t follow them when you go over the same edge again, try and stick to where line ought to be. Also stitch along the other lines of the design, using them to get around efficiently. Every now and again, stop at a junction (with the needle down) and consider which is the best direction to head in next to achieve a density of stitching that is approximately the same everywhere.

For a design where it’s not possible to stitch all the lines in one go, remember to take a few stitches in the same place at the start and end of every run, and to pull the bobbin thread up through the fabric each time you restart. Leave thread tails that are long enough to thread onto a needle later.

When you think you’ve finished, remove the hoop from under the needle and have a good look at it. Have you missed anywhere? Are any lines looking under-emphasised because they haven’t been overstitched as many times as the rest? Are the fabric edges well secured, to withstand laundering? You can always put the hoop back on the machine to remedy any such issues.

After that, remove the fabric from the hoop and take the loose thread tails through to the underside with a sewing needle. It probably isn’t necessary to darn them in, but I like to do so anyway, taking them through a few stitches or between the layers of fabric, but be conscious that dark threads may show through on the right side of a light coloured fabric.

Remove the marker pen by washing or ironing, and in any case give the appliqué a good press with a steam iron or damp cloth, both on the right side and the wrong side. Then you can make something fabulous with it.