Morley J. Moose III

I found this pattern at Keep Me in Stitches Quilt Shop in Appleton.  I fell in love with this batik moose.  He looked so fun.  However, as I said before,  I'm not so hot at applique.  But the pieces looked big, and I thought I could do this pretty easily.

This pattern is by b.j. designs and patterns from West Des Moines, Iowa.  This fabric artist has so many amazing animal designs.  Make sure you go to her website and check it out.  I fell in love with Morley's batiks. 

To make Morley, you must trace him twice.  Once onto a large piece of stabilizer and once onto the fusible web to cut out the fabric pieces.  This went really quickly because the pieces are so large.  Unless you have stabilizer that is at least 24" wide, you will have to sew two pieces of stabilizer together to make it wide enough.  I simply put butted two pieces of stabilizer and zigzagged, just as you would with batting.

Why the stabilizer?  After all the pieces are fused onto the stabilizer, they are then satin stitched to give Morley a "stained glass" look.  If you don't use the stabilizer, you will end up with puckering.  The stabilizer prevents. this. 

 All of the inside stitches get done first, then you carefully cut Morley off the stabilizer and then placed on the background.  The background is simply 3 1/2" strips.  To quilt it, I simply did a stitch in the ditch and used the satin stitch around the trees and the wavy border for more quilting. 

This pattern indicates an intermediate skill level.  It was fast, fun and I love the way it turned out.