Be Still My Beating Trapunto – The Easiest Way to Selectively Pop-Up Your Quilting

Back in the early days of my quilting journey I was fascinated by the look of trapunto because the extra batting seriously intensifies the 3-D effect of the design it lives behind and makes for a very elegant looking finished project.

Unfortunately, achieving this effect is EXTREMELY time-consuming and to me anyway – off-putting.  

The Hardest Way to Selectively Pop-Up Your Quilting

Suzanna and I decided to try the trapunto technique on a wall panel we named ‘Fairies in my Garden’, a beautiful piece that depicts 7 pale green fairies playing in a bed of autumn-ish colored tiger lilies. 

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We wanted the tiger lilies to pop more than the surrounding flora & fauna and certainly more than the fairies, since everyone knows that fairies are extremely difficult to see in the real world!   Our solution to popping out the tiger lilies – trapunto.  It’s a great technique with a very simple concept:

1. You place batting behind your project and then quilt around only those elements that you want to ‘pop up’… 
2. When you have those elements quilted, you turn the project over to the back and carefully trim away any batting that is not directly behind your chosen elements. 

So simple, yet so extremely tedious – not to mention time consuming – and a waste of perfectly good batting. 

Suzanna spent hours with a small pair of embroidery scissors, carefully trimming away any excess batting.  As I watched her I decided that there had to be a bigger, better & faster way to do this.  And there was!

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Developing a Simpler Method – the Princess YellowBelly Way

Naturally, I decided to eliminate the trimming away process altogether. 

Note:

The more heavily you quilt a design, the flatter it becomes – so, if you want a design to ‘pop’ only quilt around the outside edges the first time around.

Once all of my batting shapes were secured, I’d use basting spray over the entire back of the project and baste a layer of batting over the entire back of my project.  This effectively removes all potential wrinkles and pleats from the shaped batting pieces. 

Then I’d spray more basting spray over this layer and then lay down the backing fabric over top of this.  A hot iron works great with basting spray to remove all wrinkles. 

Finally, I’d quilt as desired – making sure to leave my double-batting design elements as lightly quilted as possible. 

Trapunto Light – The Quickest & Easiest Way to Selectively Pop-Up Your Quilting

Wah-la! Trapunto – quick and easy, or, as I like to call it – ‘Trapunto Light’!  The main dragon on my Dragon Quilt was done this way.

After I had used this new technique a number of times I found that wonderful new product – Bosal-n-R-Foam.  I actually bought the foam because I was designing a media satchel for the girls’ and the diaper bag pattern I was using as my starting point required this stuff. 

As I sewed with it I found out 2 things:

First, keep it out of the seams, and secondly, pop-up foam is much thicker than batting and when you sew enough of it into something (like a media satchel), it will actually stand up on its own! 

You can bet by the time I was finished with those 2 satchels, I had visions of trapunto dancing in my head, but this time, instead of Trapunto Light I was envisioning:

This is what I did behind the central mermaid in my ‘Ocean Maidens’ quilt.  As well as the book she’s reading and the starfish around her tide pool.  This striking, and fairly easy, technique made a HUGE difference to how much they popped out of the panel. 

Never-Ending New Applications

I was delighted by the result of this experiment, and continued using this method, until one day another idea came floating into my head.

• Does the foam ALWAYS have to be behind the design element? 
• What if I want to add another design on top of the main design and really make that ‘pop’? 

And that was how my Layer Cake Design Structure was born.  You can see examples of this in ‘My Pad’ where the frog is trapuntoed up front as well as in my Christmas Bells Table Topper where both of the bells and the clappers are ‘foam-enhanced”.  I just now made up that phrase – isn’t it great!  

So there you have my trapunto journey, from the original, century’s long traditional way of doing it, to my quick, easy, and super-enhanced way. 

Take a leap of faith and try it just once – I guarantee that you’ll love the results!

Karyl (aka Princess YellowBelly)