Project: Pieced, Appliqué, and Reverse Appliqué words

A New Text Quilt

Continuing to explore the options for creating text with fabric, my latest project began as a study of one word in different font styles. The word above was appliquéd, the technique of sewing a fabric shape onto the background fabric. In this example, the "O" is constructed with multiple layers: a white oval of background fabric, appliquéd to a red circle, attached to the background white.

The word below is traditional piecing; seaming strips of the star blue fabric with straight lined shapes of the navy background.

And this last example is reverse appliquéd, shown here in it's final form with outline quilting.

With reverse appliqué the background fabric is placed on top of the fabric that will become your shape. Then the shape is cut out of the top fabric and its edges turned under revealing the fabric beneath it. The background fabric it sewn to the shape, in effect reversing the traditional appliqué process where the shape is sewn to the background. 

Though the letter shapes in this example were cut from one piece of fabric, technically only the outside edges of the letters were reverse appliquéd. The leftover centers of the "o" & "e" were appliquéd onto the red. If I had thought to be true to the process for the whole word, I should have placed a piece of white fabric under the red, then cut the shape out of red to reveal the white. Oh, well.    

I spent a lot of time choosing the type faces for this project and matched them with the technique I thought would be most effective in their execution. Eventually, I ended up with a small sampling of different "VOTE" blocks in combinations of red, white, and blue...