Bug Mania

Quilt Block Mania block for May is ‘bugs’. Now I’m more likely to vacuum the spiders than celebrate them, but I confess to a fondness for Christmas beetles, mainly bcause they are pretty. You can get away with a lot in life if you have a bit of rainbow shimmer.

People have been noticing a decline in the number of christmas beetles, but I think that is at least partly to do with habitat - if you clean up all your leaf litter, you won’t have christmas beetles. I feel they are a bit of a metaphor for life , they crawl around in the leaf litter for 11 months of the year then burst forth in radiant splendour around christmas. Party, party, party!

I’ve made my christmas beetle out of detached applique - it highlights the segmentation of the beetle into different parts. But what I really wanted was to get the body of the beetle slightly raised compared to the feet, so I’ve done three different techniques for the applique. the easiest is all the little fiddly bits. they are just done in raw edge applique fused onto the background fabric. I used a batik fabric because it doesn’t fray a lot.

The shiny fabric for the legs and body, however, frays horribly so it needed a different technique. for the legs, I placed fusible interfacing sticky side to right side of the fabric. I sewed around the outline, trimmed and clipped curves, then slit the interfacing enough to turn the shape so all raw edges are concealed and the shape can be fused to the background. I used the same technique with body parts except instead of using interfacing, I used a fine pellon (very light fusible polyester wadding). This has made the bugs body puff up and the feet lie very flat.

You can see in the photo I have a little trouble with the edge of the interfacing showing despite my best efforts. Those little bits I’ll tack carefully before I sew around the edge with mock hand pplique using a very tiny hem stitch on my machine. The raw edge feet will be machine buttonholed when I have a minute.

I hope you have a lot of fun with the bugs.

Here is the link to my pattern.

Here are the links to the other designers. Enjoy!

12 inch blocks, appliqueSusan Griffithsapplique, beetles, australiana, christmasComment