Kissing Booth « modafabrics

I am so happy and excited to be able to share my latest project here on the Moda Bake Shop! My name is Pamela Lincoln and I blog over at Mama Spark’s World. The inspiration for this quilt is my daughter. She raises peafowl on her farm and I thought this might be a nice surprise for her in her new home. I hope you enjoy making this as much as I did. If you do make one please share it on my Flickr page, I would love to see your birds!

Let’s get started, shall we?

1 Charm Pack of Kissing Booth by Basic Grey 30310PP
1 Fat Quarter of Kissing Booth Candy Pink 30150 169
2 1/2 yards of Kissing Booth Creme Brulee 30150 166
1/2 yard of Kissing Booth Candy Pink 30310 11

1 1/2 yards Lite Steam-a-seam 2 18″ size 5418

1 1/2 yards batting (your choice)
1 Skein DMC 310 black embroidery floss 17 3371

The first thing you will need to do is print out the templates. They are located at the end of the Printer Friendly Version at the bottom of this post. I have drawn them in reverse so if you are using fusible they are all ready for you to use! Tape the peacock together overlapping where indicated to make the complete bird.

You will need to trace one bird, one wing, one of the large hearts and at least 30 of the small hearts onto your fusible. I used my light box but a window will work too. Make sure you are on the correct side if you are using the Lite SAS2 (ask me how I know this!) I drew one of the small hearts on to paper, cut it out and then traced it onto the cardboard that came with the charm pack. I cut this cardboard heart out and drew around it onto the fusible so my hearts were more consistent.

You will need to roughly cut out around the shapes, don’t cut them out on the line!

Now comes the fun part! Choose one of your charm squares for your wing, and approximately 15 other charms for your “feathers” (the small hearts). Time to fuse the hearts and the wing to your chosen charm squares. Place the right side of your fabric down on your ironing surface and place 2 hearts on the wrong side of the fabric. Following manufacturer’s directions fuse the hearts to the charm square. Do the same with the wing.

Using the plainer pink fabric that you have a FQ of you will repeat this process for the peacock’s body and the large heart. Rough cut out the peacock, and fuse the body onto the wrong side of the pink fabric. Repeat process for the large heart.

Once all this fusing is completed you need to cut out all the hearts, the wing and the peacock on the line. This will give you the components you need to make the wall hanging.

For the background you are using the Creme Brulee fabric. Cut off 1 yard from the 2 1/2 yards you began with. I left the selvedges on at this point and worked with the fabric horizontally, i.e. selvedges were on left and right rather than top an bottom. I don’t know about you but I don’t have a large space to lay things out on yet. My “design wall” is another wall hanging in my quilt room, or at least it is for now. So the largest place I had to lay out the peacock and his tail was my bed! Pay no attention to the two quilt inspectors!

This was NOT an exact science. Remove the paper backing on your pieces before you begin and grab some pins. Lay out the bird and his tail moving things around until you are happy with the placement. I put my bird quite far to the left and approximately centered between the top and bottom of the background. I then laid out the hearts until I was happy with the way they looked. Be sure to leave ~ 2 inches so you can remove selvedges and have room to move things if you are not happy. At this point I put one pin through each of the hearts and a couple to hold the bird and his wing in place. I did not put the large heart on yet, in case I wanted to be able to do some more trimming!

Now carefully pick up your masterpiece and move it to your design wall, or the floor or somewhere you can get some distance for additional viewing. Here is where my “design wall came in handy. See the blue lines and flip flops showing through from the quilt this is pinned to? I was pretty happy with the placement so it was time to fuse it all to the background. I carried the bird to my ironing board and following the manufacturer’s directions carefully fused (removing the pins a few at a time before I did the fusing).

It is now time to trim the selvedges off. I folded the top and trimmed the selvedges and also a little off the top so that my finished size was 32″ x 42″.

I folded the top in half to determine where to place my large heart, removed the paper and fused it in place also.

I like to secure all my fusible. You can do this using a ziz zag, blanket stitch or a straight stitch. I opted for a straight stitch and black thread to define everything.

I have a few tips about doing the stitching around if you are using the straight stitch. I used my open toe, zig zag foot and moved my needle over such that I could use the inside edge of the foot as a stitching guide.

I did one stitch back and then kept stitching, about half way around. Then I went under the top and gently tugged on the loose thread to bring up a loop on the back.

I pulled the top thread to the back.

Knot off the thread and trim the thread tails. Return to the sewing down your applique on the top. This does require a needle down position on your machine as you want to keep your place on the top.

Do the same with the threads when you finish your applique. This is what it will look like on the back.

Now using a marking tool, I use a pencil, and my light box, position the pattern under your piece and draw on the legs, the head feathers and the eye.

At this point you may either use your sewing machine to make the straight lines and the eye or you can embroider them. I chose to embroider them using 3 strands of black embroidery floss, a number 11 needle and a small hoop. I outlined the legs and head feathers using a back stitch. I did the circles on the head feathers with a French Knot. For the eye I did a back stitch around the outside of the eye and filled it in with a satin stitch.

DMC has an excellent embroidery stitch guide that can be found here, in case you need more direction than I am giving.

Briefly, this is what I did:

For the back stitch: Come up at A, then take a small stitch (between 1/8 and 1/4″ish) and put your needle down at point B to make one stitch. Then push your needle from behind and come up at C.

Then you will put the needle back down into the B hole. You continue this stitching to form a line.
I don’t usually travel my thread a great distance as I don’t want it to show through. As you can see from where I began stitching I would be able to stitch up to where the other toes join the leg and down one more side but then would have to either knot and restart or travel. I don’t do either of those. Instead, on the back of the piece, I weave the thread up the line I just stitched to the point I want to go to to continue stitching. In this case I was able to continue to stitch the toe on the other side of the leg, and then on the back, wove my thread up to the leg, in the center, between the two toes I just stitched. I then stitched down the center toe and threaded the floss up to it’s starting point and continued to stitch the rest of the leg. I finished the leg with a small knot and threaded the floss down a few stitches on the back and clipped the floss off.

I outlined the eye using a back stitch as well. I seem to do better with a thread guide to use for my satin stitching.

I filled in the eye using a satin stitch.

I used the back stitch for the head feathers with a triple french knot at the end of each feather. This means I wrapped the thread around the needle 3 times before finishing the knot. I could not, for the life of me figure out how to photograph that, I would have needed another hand! You can see it in the stitch guide though.

VOILA! Your peacock is now complete and ready for you to baste, quilt and bind as desired.

I chose a heart pattern with some simple stitching in between the feathers and some on my bird’s body. Before you bind you may want to attach a hanging sleeve.