Amsterdam Applique Cushion

I have always loved the look of the buildings in Amsterdam, I’ve never been myself, but I have seen images of the iconic buildings along the canals. So when my sister and her boyfriend visited Amsterdam last year, I was very pleased they sent me a postcard of the very same iconic streets.  It also sparked an idea, one that stayed brewing in my mind for a while before I got the chance to give it a go.

My idea was to create an appliqué street design based on the wonderful buildings. The perfect opportunity arrived to put my plan into action when my sister and her boyfriend bought a flat earlier this year, so I set about creating a flat warming gift of a handmade cushion. So with the help of the postcard and a quick google image search I drew out a rough street plan.

I purposely didn’t want to make it too neat, so I started drawing by hand and then neatened up the edges when I started cutting out the templates. Having only moved into their flat a few months ago they haven’t got around to decorating yet so I decided to select colours that should hopefully go with everything, resulting in a combination of greys and cream, with just a splash of colour.

Once I cut my templates out, including all the fiddly windows, I decided the order of the buildings. Then I cut pieces of bondaweb for each building (leaving the windows in and making the bondaweb a little bigger than needed). I ironed the bondaweb onto my selected fabrics and then cut them down to size making the edges nice and neat.  I then traced the windows into position and cut them out with a craft knife, it took a little longer than I anticipated, but was worth it.

I had intended to use some of the cut out windows to fill in the windows of the other houses, swapping the colours around, which I did do for a few of the buildings, however I did find trimming down and filling all the windows a little laborious and fiddly. So I changed tack and added plain fabric to the back of some of the houses instead, which made life much easier.

Having lined everything up with the help of my long patchwork ruler I got everything stuck into place with the iron.

I sewed around the edge of everything with the solid zig-zag. However having chosen mostly thin cotton fabric, the cream fabric was a little thicker and caused a few problems when it came to sewing over the edges, as I stitched over all the vertical lines bits of the fabric started poking out in between the zig-zag stitches – eeeek! It was too late to change anything so I proceeded  armed with a little frustration and determination and stitched over the cream edges again and in some cases a third time as well. I also decided to remove the cream windows I had planned to add to one of the buildings –  I figured it would tie the background colour into the design more, or as my sister later stated it looked like a derelict building – I can live with that.

In the end all the hard work was worth it, this was my first big appliqué project, I learnt a lot, the finished item is not perfect and there’s a few things I would do differently next time, but I am rather happy with it and the reaction when the gift was opened was great. They instantly recognised it as Amsterdam, which I wasn’t sure they would, given my artistic licence with the building designs.