I was inspired by a picture of a bald eagle dipping his tail in the water. I enlarged the picture to approximately 33" wide, printed it on very lightweight paper, taped the sheets together & cut away some of the wasted background to reduce bulk.
I decided that there needed to be a reason for the eagle to be in the water & I found this fish print in my stash.
I cut out 4 fish with lots of background & starched them until they felt like typing paper.
I laid the printed eagle upside down on my background fabric to decide where to place the fish. It had to be upside down, because I'm going to be attaching it to the wrong side of my background to do the applique.
I put a stripe of glue stick glue on each fish for a temporary hold & stuck them down on the background.
I sewed around the fish, using a free motion foot & small stitches. (Bernina BSR-I love it!)
I trimmed close to the stitches leaving a tiny bit of background fabric.
Next, I used a fine nylon thread to do a narrow zig zag around each fish.
With fish securely attached, I decided to put "water" over the fish. This first layer is very irredescent & sparkly, but the camera didn't pick that up.
The second layer of "water" is a polyester chiffon. .
After trimming the water fabrics to match the cotton background, I ironed them all together & pinned all over to prepare for stitching to stabilize the background. More to come in my next post
