Making Silk Stems

I am at the stage of adding the Myrtle plant to my silk quilt.  The Myrtle will be made up of bias cut stems machine quilted to the background then 3D leaves and 3D flowers added individually.

So I have been working on the stems for a couple of days.  They are bias cut from gold coloured silk in strips one inch wide. 

These are folded in half lengthways and ironed wrong sides together then machine stitched with the folded edge lined up with the edge of the presser foot and the raw edge inside. See the photo.

After sewing, the raw edge is trimmed to about 1/8th of an inch. Then it has to be pressed with the sewn edge lined centrally down the strip.  The easiest way to achieve this is to use plastic loop pressing bars.  The green ones in the photo are from Clover and the yellow ones from another supplier.

Not everybody calls them loop pressing bars but the purpose of them is to insert into the fabric tube and twist the fabric into position.  Then iron the plastic bar and the bias strip together with the raw edge underneath and hidden making a nice smooth strip to use however you choose.



 The fabric has to be pushed up the bar then keep ironing the lower flat part a little at a time with the raw edge turned to one side underneath so it doesn't show on the right side.  As you work pull the pressed part of the fabric strip off the bar all neat and ready to use.

 I roll my strips around a cardboard tube to keep until I want to use them.

Here you see I have used 3 strips together which will branch out to form the Myrtle stems across the quilt. The next stage is to machine quilt them in position then think about the placement of the leaves and the flowers..