Halloween applique tips

Have I said it before? I love doing appliqué!

It is easy to make some basic shapes to put on doll t-shirts for quick and easy Halloween outfits.

I like the jack-o-lanterns the best.

The best shapes are ones that can be cut out as one piece, whether they are pumpkins, cats, bats or ghosts.

Here is one of my jack-o-lanterns on a black t-shirt.

Black is great on my AGD Lea Clark®

Lea is a bright spring or maybe a true spring. She looks good in clothes that have a high contrast with each other and with her face and hair. being a Spring a yellow or orange pumpkin looks better than a white ghost. She looks good in warm colours.

Because this element is fairly large the outline around the inside of the pumpkin and the outside of the face features fits in and looks OK. 

This particular sample has the outline drawn on with a pen but I have now tried free motion stitching on the knit fabric and find that it goes quite smoothly with a stretch needle and a straight stitch.

I wanted to do something for my blonde girl. She is a truly me combination with deep blue eyes, light blonde hair and pink tinge skin. Because she is a light spring, outfits with a lot of black don't look pretty on her. I made a white t-shirt and put a pale yellow pumpkin on and used dark orange stitching.

You can see on the close up of this appliqué that the stitching around the outside of the features tends to run together so I had to redraw the face features a bit smaller so stitching around the outside of them would make them look the right size.

When you draw up a design that has an open feature on the inside you need to draw the feature a bit smaller than you would normally.

Such as the eyes on a ghost shape. Of course the same principles apply for any appliqué shape not just halloween appliqué.

This is the smaller shape I used on the white t-shirt. I made the features smaller so next time my stitching will look better.

This second one is the shape before I made the features smaller. You would use this one if you want to stick the features on top and stitch inside them.

Here is another jack-o-lantern with a less evil face. It is the one I used on the black t-shirt.

Don't forget to reverse your drawing when you want to trace it onto the appliqué paper.