I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before how much I hate appliqué. So, I’ll tell you now that I really hate appliqué.

To illustrate how much I hate appliqué, here is a picture from the pattern for an appliqué pillow that I’m working on:

And here is a photo of the progress I’ve made on my own version of this pillow:

I know, you’re thinking that I’ve made great progress … but here’s the thing: I started working on this pillow in 2004. Yup, that’s right, I’ve been working on it for 12 years, and I’ll I’ve done is a handful of vines, and the start of 4 of the 12 flowers. I haven’t even begun to tackle the 16 leaves.

Soon, the needle stuck in the lower left flower will qualify as an antique, and still I’m not moving forward on this.

A lot of appliqué designs feel too cutesy for me, so for the most part, I’ve been able to live a full life without appliqué, but at least a quarter of the blocks in this Dear Paulette quilt call for it, so I’m going to have to buckle down and do some.

I put it off as long as I could, completing 10 other blocks first, but it was finally time for me to tackle my first appliqué block. The block is titled “Jane’s Tears”, and I didn’t expect this to go well, so I feel like it is aptly-titled.

Note: I realized later that the use of the dark red fabric for the tears makes them look more like drops of blood … didn’t really think that one through. If I was thinking, I might have switched the fabrics around so that I had white floral tears on a red background instead.

I dragged my feet for as long as I could, waiting a full week before even starting the quilt block, and then taking at least a week to cut out the templates and trace them on to the fabric.

I spent a few days congratulating myself about how I could still use my Epiphany from the previous block for appliqué. When you trace around the pattern pieces, your pencil line is ever-so-slightly outside the pattern line, so once again, your scant seam allowance is built right in.

Cutting out the four tear-shaped pieces chewed up another couple of evenings.

Then I spent quite a bit of time reading up on how to do appliqué again. I’d taken a needleturn appliqué class back in the dawn of time (around the time I started that stupid pillow, in fact), but my skills were more than a little rusty.

For you appliqué newbies, needleturn appliqué is a hand-sewing technique where you stitch around the edge of the appliqué shape, using the tip of your needle to push the extra fabric in the seam allowance underneath the shape as you go.

Finally, I started stitching on the first tear shape. About two inches into it, I realized the seam allowance was much too big. I was not used to appliquéing these tiny shapes, and there was just too much to stuff underneath.

So I pulled out my stitches, cut off about half of the seam allowance around the tear shape, and began again. That tear came out slightly misshapen, but I certainly wasn’t going to do it over again. Just imagine that Jane is crying at an angle, and gravity is affecting the shape of the tear.

After the first tear shape was done, I naturally had to rest for a couple of days before starting the next one. In fact, I had to rest between each one. You don’t want to get overtired when you appliqué.

Long story short, a block that took less than an hour in actual appliqué time ended up occupying my time for almost a month, from start to finish.

But the procrastination wasn’t even done yet. Once the block was completed, I for some reason procrastinated on writing the blog article about it. So, here it is almost two weeks later, and I’m just now getting my thoughts down.

That’s how much I hate appliqué; I can barely even stand to write about it!

One wonders how I’m going to get through the other fifty-some appliqué blocks in this quilt.