Tip Two, Through the Tulips . . .

Remember Tiny Tim strumming his ukelele and singing Tip Toe, Through the Tulips? By today's standards, he wouldn't have been nearly as odd as we thought him then, would he? Anyway, when I was thinking about "tip two," my mind traveled back in time, and I couldn't resist bringing you along with me on my trip down memory lane.

When I was at the retreat last weekend, I blogged that I'd gotten a couple applique tips, but I only told you about one of them, and my friend Sandy kept asking me when I was going to talk about the other tips. So I guess this is as good a time as any.

This tip is about those points again. Like when you're appliqueing stars and such. After you prep your piece, the points have a little flag flying out the back, like you see here on this star AND on the pieces you can see on the left side of the photo:

The way Heidi--the woman who appliques for Verna and who gave us an applique lesson--treats those little flags is to trim them just slightly and then tuck them into the point. The first step is to sneak up on the flag from the opposite side of the point, as you can see here, keeping your stitches closer together as you approach the point. Then make sure you take one or two stitches right at the point.

Around now, or maybe a little before you reach the point, you can trim the flag a little bit at the tip, but don't cut too close. Now, carefully push the flag under the applique piece.

In experimenting with this, I found that sometimes using the eye of a larger needle helped to push the flag under, and then I held it under with my thumbnail while I took the first couple stitches coming back down away from the point. And sometimes it helped to come up with my needle through the background fabric first and then come up with my needle separately through the applique piece, so the thread wouldn't catch on the flag but it would keep it trapped underneath the applique.

I can see this will take a little practice, but I've been pretty happy with the way it preserves those points so far.

And now that I've passed this tip on, I'm going to expect some really wonderful points from my friend Sandy! THAT should make her think twice about being too persistent!