Be Mine

Here's a piece I did a while back, and it is so appropriate for today, being Valentine's Day. It is called, cleverly enough, 15 Hearts. I can use it to illustrate one of the fun things about fusing.
I made each one of these hearts and the rectangles they are placed upon using the original heart and it's cut away sister.
What?
When I place a shape on another shape, I cut away what is underneath, the part that won't be seen, leaving me with a similar shape as a leftover. For example ...on the top row of hearts, in the second position is a red heart on a checkerboard rectangle. I removed the heart shaped checkboard fabric and reused it down at the bottom on the last heart. Ta da! Nothing goes to waste!




The same thing was done with the red heart on the dotted fabric, here on the right. I used the dotted heart at the bottom left on top of a pinky heart, on top of orange background.

The orange heart next to it looks like it is stuck on with sticky tape, which is of course fabric, cut with a deckle blade rotary cutter. So fun.

A reader asked how I joined the blocks on my In the Pink quilt top, and I can show you how with this small quilt. What one does here and with other designs is connect by overlapping the shapes of the foreground images. In this last picture you will see red as the background, but it is not one whole sheet of fabric, it is actually small scrap bits slipped under the connecting images and fused into place (on the release paper of course). The reason I do this is to have fewer layers to stitch through, making it easy to hand quilt or embroider on the piece. And I also avoid show through on light fabrics if the background is not under them. It may seem picky, but it is now a habit to use less fabric where it won't show anyway, making a lighter softer finished work.
I usually fuse the under piece without it connecting any other way to the top layer. But in some cases, the underlayer, is also connected to the upper surface like this:

In case you can't read what it says: this thin pink strip is ove the lighter pink above, but under the wider pink strip below. It's just the way it got assembled.
In anticipation of thread questions, I used perle cotton #8 for the handwork.
I hope you get a hug and a kiss from your Valentine today. Mine are all currently snoring away...