Craft Day with Mom

When I embarked on this whole working-from-home thing this year, I decided that one of the benefits would be to get paid partially in time. So, while this adventure occasionally means becoming deeply involved with Top Ramen, it also means that I get to take a decadent day of crafting with my super-crafty Mom once in a while. . . in the middle of the week. Hee hee!

Mom and I have been mesmerized by three sofa cushions she’s had for years. They are Mola cushions — examples of reverse-applique art, made by the Kuna people of the San Blas Islands. If you follow these links, you can see some flippin’ gorgeous images of this kind of applique. The photo above is from Wikipedia.

This stuff is amazing! It involves layers and layers of fabrics, with windows cut all over the place to reveal the colors at the various layers. And did I mention, thousands of tiny, tiny stitches to hold the layers together.

Well, Mom and I have been trying to figure out how to do this forever. And as fate would have it, my grandmother gave me a wonderful 1964 McCall’s needlework book for Christmas, and it has a little tutorial for reverse applique! Woo! So we got together yesterday to make samplers and learn how this stuff is done.

 

You start with several layers of fabric, basted together around the edges. (We used three, but the Kuna often use six or seven.)

Then, you caretully cut a shape out of the top layer of fabric only.

 

Next, you clip all around the edges of your cut-out, making roughly 1/8” cuts. And then, you turn the raw edge under 1/8”, and slip stitch it in place.

Here’s Mom’s sampler in progress. The thing you can’t see in this photo, unfortunately, is the beautiful precision of her slip stitching. She’s an amazing seamstress. I am more of a free-spirit slip-stitcher.

 

Then, you cut a shape in the next layer of fabric, and clip it. Turn that under and sitich it in place. You can follow your original shape, or cut a completely different shape.

The coolest thing is, you can also sew some traditional applique pieces onto your work. So here, I’ve cut two more layers of fabric and basted them to my sampler. Then, I clipped them, turned both raw edges under together, and stitched them down. Now I can add even more color layers!

Mom, being a genius, figured out that you can get a similar result by basting additional pieces of fabric to the back of your samper, so you can then cut down to them from the front.

Here I am cutting into my two-layer applique to reveal the colors. Hopefully this photo also gives you some idea of how the different layers of fabric begin to create dimension.

I was so excited about this whole concept, I actually had dreams about it last night. Imagine how this technique translates to handmade bags, and pendants, and book covers . . . oh, my!