hi I'm Wendy from shiny happy world and in today's video I'm going to show you how to do a fake trapunto trapunto is a very very old quilting method that makes some sections of your quilting be puffy it's a very very very laborious time-consuming process that involves stuffing the back through the back of the quilt after you do your quilting that's not what I'm going to do here I'm going to show you how to do a fake trapunto method that's really really easy and fast and gives a fun 3d effect to your final quilt blocks so here's an example of a block that has one fake trapunto piece everything on the house and the tree and the ground is flat and smooth like normal applique but if you look up at this happy little cloud its puffy so it's actually a little stuffed cloud that is sewn down to the surface of your block and that's what I'm going to show you how to do here let me show you this is the block we're going to be working with totally different house and we have a tree trunk here that's missing its top so what we're going to do here I'm going to show you how to make a little puffy tree top for that tree trunk so this is the piece that we're going to work with it is two pieces of fabric well actually this is one piece folded in half but you can use two pieces you want to put the two pieces right side together and then I've traced the tree pattern that I'm going to use on freezer paper freezer paper is really great you can buy it the grocery stores here in the US it can be a little harder to find in other countries but it's papery on one side and it's plasticky feeling on the back side and what's wonderful about it for quilting is that you can iron it to fabric and it'll stick temporarily while you sew around it and then you can peel it off and it doesn't leave any residue behind so I've trade I've traced my pattern piece onto freezer paper and I've stuck it down to the back side of the fabric and now we're going to go over to the Machine and I'm going to use this as a guide and I'm going to just sew all the way around the edge all the way around this shape so that's what we're going to do next going over to the machine so we've got our piece I've got just regular thread in the machine a regular needle nothing fancy I do have my stitch length a little bit shorter than usual I have it set at a 2 that's going to help me navigate these tight curves without any awkwardness I'm going to start my sewing on this straight ish edge I always start and stop my sewing on the straightest piece of the shape that I can find because that makes it the easiest to match up my end with the beginning smoothly so I buried my needle right along the edge of that freezer paper now I'm going to lower my presser foot and I'm just going to very slowly so all the way around this piece I'm going to end up turning it right-side out but I'm not leaving an opening for turning and stuffing I'll show you what we do for that in just a minute so I want to go nice and smooth around these corner around these curves and to do that anytime I start to feel like I'm getting the curves are getting ahead of me I stop let that presser foot lift up I've got my needle down and I just sew until I feel like I need to reposition it again and I'm just the short stitch link helps me keep those curves nice and smooth I'm just going to work my way all the way around this shape so I'm going to keep sewing here and we will come back and I'll show you how to turn it and stuff it so when I got to the end of this I actually just overlapped by a give out a quarter of an inch the starting stitching so that I didn't have to tie a knot or anything like that that overlapping stitching will be fine so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to trim away the excess fabric I like to use pinking shears because it's going to help me minimize bulk but you do not want to get too close to that edge you're actually going to put a fair bit of stress on this piece turning it smoothing it stuffing it and even with that that very small stitch length that's going to tend to be pretty strong I don't want to I don't want to take any risks of poking through my stitching there so I'm not going to trim this right to the stitching line I'm just going to trim away a lot of excess bulk so I pinked around the edges now we've got a couple more things we need to do I'm going to first take off this freezer paper now you can see my stitching line I usually just use a matching thread and this does match the front of the fabric but the darker green shows up nicely on the back with all these little points here when I turn this right side out it'll just bunch up in those corners so you need to do here you do need to snip right up to that line of stitching so I don't want to cut into the stitches but I want to go right up into that corner so I'm going to do that in all of my corners so you'll need to do that if you have any outside curves any convex curves I'm sorry convex curves don't need any special treatment concave curves need to have their seam allowance snipped in and these inside points like this need to be snipped right up into the stitching there okay so now I've released that in all of my corners so now I need to create a hole to turn it right side out so I'm going to pull these layers apart you're never going to see the back of this so just cut a little snip in there and then I am going to enlarge it a little bit just with the scissors so that I can turn that right side out and if it's a smaller piece you might want to use some turning tubes but for a piece this size it's easy enough to get my to get my fingers in there I'm going to use a nice smooth stick to push out all of these curves get everything nice and smooth so this is a fairly complex shape but it's big enough and the curves are gentle enough that it's going to work just fine so don't worry about that big hole this is what it's going to look like from the front so now I have my piece sewn all the way around nice and smoothed out and it's ready for stuffing so I'm going to flip it back over that opening and I've got some stuffing here and I'm just going to take off some pieces and stuff them in there you don't want to stuff this too tight you really just want it to be lightly puffy because you're going to need to sew it down after it's stuffed so you need to be able to still get the edges under your presser foot so I'm going to do a little bit more and then I'll show you from the front make a little test to see if you've stuffed it enough but not too much so you'll notice I'm just putting a little clump in each of those curves this is not one where you want to just take one big mass of stuffing and try and get it in there and get it smoothly you just want to put a little pinch in each curve I need a little bit more than this one not too much alright so I think that's going to be good I'm going to flip it note see that needs a little bit more see how that's just kind of flappy and sad we're going to stuff a little bit more in there and I'm not actually adding more stuffing for that I'm just pushing it into that corner there so that's better so you want something that is visibly puffy and smooth so you don't get those sad flat places there but you still want it to be soft enough that if you set it on the table you can mostly squish it down you don't need to be able to squish it totally flat but imagine putting that underneath your presser foot you need to be able to smoosh it a little bit so that's what we're going to do next I'll show you we're going to position it on our block now you could stick this down with some glue you just put a swipe of fabric glue on the back but I'm not going to worry about that I'm just going to put it where it looks nice on the tree trunk and I'm going to take it back over to the machine and I'm going to show you how to sew that down okay we've got our tree in place and I'm going to start sewing again right at the bottom that smoothest straightest part and I'm going to get it in place and I like to take just the tiniest bite I am really just going through the very edge of that piece now lower my presser foot and now I'm going to start sewing and there goes and I'm just going to very slowly work my way all the way around and just so that edge down this is going to reinforce those edges sometimes when it gets into those corners if it's as particularly puffy piece the hover feature on my Bernina is not going to raise it enough for me to easily spin that so I'm leaving the needle down but I'm going to raise the presser foot up so I can do this kind of huge spinning maneuver that I have to do in the point there lower it back down you can do all of that everything that my machine is doing here automatically if you don't have a machine that has that stop with the needle down and then hover the presser foot up you can do all of that manually just use the hand crank on the side to put your needle down and then use your lever to raise and lower your presser foot as you need it is that up again I'm using matching thread here I usually use black thread for all of my outlining I really like that it's very very simple stitching and I really like their kind of cartoony effect that it gives but I have found on these pieces that I really prefer to use a matching thread for two reasons one there's the practical reason that when you're when you're trying to sew down something that's puffy like this it's a little harder to be perfectly neat you can still get pretty neat stitching if you go nice and slow but it's harder to be neat and if you use the black thread it's going to show up a lot more so if you do make any mistakes or go wobbly somewhere it's going to be a lot more visible but also just aesthetically I really prefer the look of the matching thread even in this case where it's just a little bit darker so it still shows up as a nice outline but it doesn't stand out quite so much and it also I think makes these puffy pieces just look a little bit different than the regular applique pieces in the same block that are all outlined with the black thread we're getting in our last point here almost all the way around just working my way there and slowly and just like when I sewed the three together the first time I'm going to just overlap that first bit of stitching not on thread and I've got a puffy tree so let's go back to the table where the lights a little bit better and I'll show you the finished block so here's the finished block we've got all the flat applique on the house and you can see that black outline that I was talking about and then you can zoom in and see that you've got this puffy happy little tree so that's it a really easy totally fake way to do trapunto instead of stuffing it from the back of the quilt and then doing another quilt back underneath that we sew the piece stuff it and then apply it to the quilt so it's really like a trapunto applique I'm Wendy from shiny happy world I'll see you next time