I bought a jacket pattern a couple of weeks ago from Indygo Junction.  You can find the pattern here. I had heard about rayon batik and thought that sounded like the perfect fabric weight for a summer jacket. Since I was at our LQS for the monthly machine quilting bee, I took the pattern with me and asked if they had any in stock – yep! One thing I didn’t catch at the time – the pattern calls for 54″ fabric and this was 44″.  When I caught that at home, I literally gasped out loud.  Turns out, it worked out fine and I had fabric to spare. I told the women at the bee that I’d have it knocked out in an afternoon and I wasn’t far off schedule.  I cut it yesterday afternoon and literally finished sewing it top to bottom the this afternoon, including hemming.  The only problem was, the teenager had other plans and I didn’t get a picture of me modeling it so you’ll just have to pretend it looks as good on a real person as it does on a hanger! This pattern is so easy – the sleeves are cut as one pattern with the back/front so they aren’t a separate pattern piece.  That makes it really fast and easy.

After I whipped that out, I took another stab at this concept of applique combined with machine embroidery. I did finally buy a pair of applique scissors and that has helped a lot. But I also saw that I could use my Scan ‘n Cut to cut the pieces out to the exact size needed.  Wow! What a show stopper now that I’ve figured this out. I already had the cut file so I didn’t even have to create that. And the pattern says what size to cut the pieces so since I need 4 quadrants for the inner portion of the medallion quilt, I just cut 4 of each piece to save time. I let the machine auto align them to the top and cut a strip of fabric big enough to cover all 4.

Then I cut 2 pieces of wax paper slightly larger than that and put the fabric inside with the wax side facing in, touching the fabric. After a good ironing, it was stiff enough to go into the machine.  I upped the pressure a little bit to go through 3 layers and on my 2nd try, I had it figured out.  They suggest making the pieces 1-2mm larger so that the tacking stitch catches it. I forgot that part but I did spray some adhesive so the fabric didn’t move anyway. That is so much faster and accurate than taking the hoop off each time to trim the fabric, then put the hoop back on to finish every single piece.  I do need a 2nd thumb drive though; I keep moving it from the Scan ‘n Cut to the embroidery machine and back.