Hubris Never Pays: The Applique "Tutorial"

You hear me? Hubris never pays. It seems so self-evident, so why take it up? Heavens to Betsy, why?

I think it must creep up on you slowly. It must. Because you're not gonna see it walking down the street and think, "Gimme some of that!" I think it starts out as perfectly reasonable self-confidence. And next thing you know, zip, zap, zop! You're on the Hubris Express straight to hell, leaving handbasket after motherloving handbasket in your dust. That's gotta be how it happened....er, happens.

hubris -- exaggerated self pride or self-confidence, often resulting in fatal retribution. (Wikipedia)

I'm gonna level with you. I was pretty confident I'd found THE BEST WAY to get those flowers onto that heating pad cover. I did research on applique. I made prototypes. And it wasn't too far into it that I was ready to name my findings after myself: "The Best Way to Applique: A Technique for the Full-of-Themselves."

But Dr. B., you did research and tested things out. You can't then accuse yourself of hubris, what with the research.

Yeah, maybe. But no. Here's why. In the prototype phase:

MY INSIDE VOICE (kind of quiet and sinister): This is the best. Really the best! I've taken all the best parts of everyone's ideas and created a super-technique to rival even the most expert applique-master ever! I will rule the world!!

Ok, it didn't go that far. But I did think I was onto something quite good.

With my super full-of-it plan, I was going to avoid:

1. the painstaking process of tucking the edges of the flower under as I sewed it onto the heating pad cover (a technique known as needle-turning);
2. raw edges of the flower being left exposed, a look that our research showed many seem to despise; and
3. a glue stick, even though this seems to be popular.

My plan looked a little something like this:

With the right side of my fabric to the paper side of my Wonder Under (we'll just call it WU), I traced my pre-made flower onto the WU. I cut the shape out of the WU, same size as the flower.


I sewed the two things together with a pretty small seam allowance.


I trimmed the corners.


Then, I got everything ready to turn the flappin' thing right-side out.

I pinched the WU, to avoid cutting the fabric when I sliced it.


I cut a slit in the WU -- not in the flower -- big enough that the turning wouldn't be horrible.


I turned the whole thing inside out.


And I pushed all the corners out so that I had this:


With a dry iron, I pressed it for about 5 seconds so that the sticky-ish sticky stuff between the paper and the fabric would adhere to the fabric.


And then I carefully peeled off the paper backing to reveal said sticky-ish stuff.


Fine. On my prototype it worked great -- I took my "flower", placed it on my "heating pad cover" and pressed it in place with a dry iron on the highest setting for a handful of seconds... maybe 10. Voila! Everything was tucked under, no raw edges, no glue stick! Just a stand-in flower stuck to a stand-in heating pad cover, ready to be blanket-stitched on for cuteness and stability!

I guess technically there's no reason it shouldn't work.

But I don't think it's the best way. It doesn't seem like there is enough sticky stuff on the edges. There are threads showing from where I sewed around. And I accidently pulled a thread out of the fabric in my zeal to remove the paper backing which, as you can imagine, yields less-than-appealing results. (I can't really blame the method for that one, though.)

I'm going to go on record as saying that I am reluctant to proceed in this manner. Maybe it's just the fear of "fatal retribution" that has me so skiddish. Maybe it's my inner wisdom telling me to turn to another technique. Hmm.

Me scared.

(In hell, if you're a grown-up who talks like a little kid, sometimes they let you eat popsicles. Other times, they don't look kindly on it at all. Using all my inner wisdom, I'm hoping for popsicles.)