Joseph's Coat - part 1

This is a project that I've been working on for a while and have taken a long time to write a post about it. We decided the post is too long for just one day, so Kirsten suggested a week dedicated to my Joseph's coat quilt. Hope you enjoy the trip :)

A few months ago, I bumped into the Joseph’s coat quilt along at Don’t Look Now blog site.  I totally fell in love with her quilt. Since I knew I was going on a rather long road trip during the summer (which I’m actually on as I begin writing this blog post) I decided that it would be a great project to take with me since it’s lots of hand stitching.  As I looked at that project, I realized I’d have to cut 637 petals out of fusible, wash away material and they needed to be really accurate. I knew it would be really time consuming and not something I would have a lot of patience for.  I’m a tool and technology junkie.  I have a Cricut and the software package called "Sure Cuts A Lot" that allows you to cut anything that you can draw and save in an SVG file format. So, I started drawing my circles in Adobe Illustrator because that program will create SVG files. Then I set up my file to cut the petals.

I started cutting, using Floraini Stitch & Wash Fusible. No good! The fusible material was too fibery for the Cricut to cut cleanly. One of the people already well into the quilt along mentioned in the flickr discussion that she had heard of another fusible, wash away material that came in 8 ½ x 11” sheets that you can print your design on using your ink jet printer, so I located a package of C&T Publishing: Wash-Away Applique Sheets and gave that one a try. And it worked! HURRAY! I could use my Cricut to cut the fusible bits for the first step!