How to Appliqué with Ladder Stitch

We were on the road one morning recently and I was stitching hexie flowers to their backgrounds for my Shoo Fly Garden blocks when I thought, "I should write a tutorial for this." So here I am 😊

I'm using ladder stitch to attach the hexie flowers to the background and I'm always amazed at how invisible the stitches are. It makes me think of a scene in a book I read many years ago (though I can't remember the name of the book, the author, or anything else except this one scene). In the scene I remember, Japanese school girls are hand sewing kimonos and the protagonist/narrator says that her older sister was showing off how invisible her stitches were by using red thread to sew a white kimono. I know nothing about sewing kimonos, so I have no idea what stitch they would have been using, but ladder stitch might just be invisible enough for that!

To do appliqué with ladder stitch, the seam allowance of the appliqué shape needs to be folded under. You can't have raw edges for this technique. English Paper Piecing shapes, like my hexie flowers, are perfect, since their edges are folded under. The way I made the circles for my 2020 temperature quilt also resulted in the edges being turned under, so I used ladder stitch to appliqué them to their backgrounds, too. This would also work for appliqué shapes you've prepared with the freezer paper method, though I've never tried that. Basically, any appliqué shape with the seam allowance folded to the back is perfect for stitching to the background with ladder stitch.

What you'll need

• Your appliqué shapes
• Your background square
• Small pins
• Thread to match the appliqué fabric (or bright red, if you're feeling brave!)
• Hand sewing needle
• Thread gloss (optional, but I find it helpful)

First, position the appliqué on the background square. If you want to be sure it's centered, fold the background in half horizontally and vertically and finger press it to create light creases, then use the creases to center the appliqué. Pin the appliqué in place. I love these tiny appliqué pins from Clover!

Thread your hand sewing needle with the thread, then run the thread through the thread gloss if you're using it. I use So Fine Thread Gloss and the Satsuma scent is my favourite (I also have and use vanilla and strawberry).

Tie a knot at the end of the thread. I do this by wrapping the thread around the end of my finger twice, then rolling it off my finger and pulling it tight. I then wrap it around my finger again and roll it off, aiming to get the new knot to land right on top of the first one, making it slightly larger. I find this helps prevent the knot from pulling through the fabric.

I take a tiny stitch just through the background where it will be hidden under the appliqué shape.

To start the ladder stitch, bring the needle up through the background to the right side at the edge of the appliqué shape. All of the work will be done from the right side of the fabric.

Insert the needle into the edge of the appliqué shape, where the seam allowance is folded over, and travel it through the fold just a little bit. I usually travel about ⅛", but it's not exact.

Pull the needle out of the fold of the seam allowance and pull the thread tight, but not so tight that you ripple the background fabric.

Insert the needle into the background square, right at the edge of the appliqué shape, and then back up, again about ⅛" away. Pull the thread tight.

Again, insert the needle into the fold at the edge of the appliqué shape and take a stitch about ⅛" long. Insert the needle into the background square and take a stitch about ⅛" long. Repeat all the way around your appliqué shape.

If there are corners on your appliqué shape, be sure to have a stitch right at the corner to secure it down.

Here's what the stitches look like from the back.

When you come back around to where you started, or if your thread gets too short, pull the needle through to the wrong side of the background, right at the edge of the appliqué shape. 

I like to take a small stitch only through the background that is hidden under the appliqué shape. Then take another tiny stitch only through the background, but leave the needle in the fabric. Wrap the thread around the needle two or three times, then pull the needle the rest of the way through to create a knot. I usually take another tiny stitch just to secure it a little more, then trim the thread.

That's it! You appliqué shape is now secured to the background with nearly invisible stitches. Feel free to admire it for a minute or two before moving on to the next block 😊

Portals Mini Quilt

As I mentioned last month, we're doing a Mini of the Month series for 2026 in the Stash Artists membership. Portals is the mini quilt pattern for February and I'm so in love with this little quilt!

I love that picture, too, even if it doesn't show the whole quilt. My sister-in-law and I went out snowshoeing Sunday afternoon, and I took Portals along to try to get pictures. We really wanted to stand it up against these trees, but it kept flopping over as soon as she let go of it, which made us laugh every single time 🤣 We finally managed to get that picture above, and then had to give up on trying to get a straight picture of the whole quilt there.

Instead, here's one of me holding it.

And another one that shows the beautiful scenery. This is just a few minutes trek through the woods behind our house.

Portals was inspired by some of the books I've read over the past few years:

• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix Harrow
• The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern
• Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
• The Unmaking of June Farrow, by Adrienne Young

In all of the books, characters find themselves traveling to other places and/or times through doorways they find. Aside from sharing the 'traveling through doors' part, the books are all wildly different and I'd be hard pressed to pick a favourite (though Every Heart a Doorway lands at the bottom of the list. It was okay, but not on the same level as the others). I guess it's like how we can make four quilts using Friendship Star blocks and they'd all be different 😊

A version of this design had been sitting in my EQ8 files for a couple of years, but I wasn't enthused enough about it to make it. That version was larger, with all the 'doors' coloured the same and lined up perfectly. I think I was going for a Roman aqueduct kind of look, but it wasn't working. When I was looking through my designs a few months ago, I tried colouring them all differently and staggering the middle row, and that's when I saw them as similar to the doorways in the books.

Of course, in the books the doors are scattered around here, there, and everywhere. The characters are either hunting for them or stumbling upon them, depending on the book. They're not all gathered neatly in one place where the character could look from one to the other and choose where to go. That works well for a book, but not so well for a mini quilt!

I chose the name Portals rather than Doors because I wanted to reference the fact these aren't ordinary doors just leading to the next room. They're portals leading to somewhere totally different and I had a lot of fun choosing fabrics that made me feel like I wanted to travel to the places behind them.

The doors are applique, with bias tape applique for the frame around them. That means the quilt top was really quick to put together. 

For the quilting, I used Aurifil 50 wt thread to match each of the doors and echoed the shape of the door, working my way in to the middle of the door. Then I used navy Aurifil to quilt three lines in the 'floor' under the two upper rows of doors. That fabric looks black in the pictures, but it is navy. Then for the background, I used white Aurifil to outline the doors and echo that line again, then I quilted a dense stipple all over the background. As always, I love how the quilting looks on the back!

There must have been a couple of snowflakes on the camera that created those blurry spots.

As you can see, I did all the echo quilting with my free motion foot, so the lines are organic and straight-ish rather than the perfectly straight and evenly-spaced lines they could be if I used my walking foot. I really don't enjoy quilting with my walking foot, though, so I prefer to embrace the imperfections of free motion quilting.

Making mini quilts every month is definitely helping with my stash of small pieces of Warm and Natural batting. Of course, I'm also making larger quilts, which produce those small off-cut pieces, so it's a never-ending cycle!

If you love scrappy and stash-friendly patterns (and mini quilt patterns!), come join us in Stash Artists! Along with the patterns, we also sew together over Zoom once a month, which is always a lovely time of community.

What fabrics would you use for your doors? And where/when would you want to travel?

Shining Softly Quilt

Welcome to another TGIFF party! And if you're thinking, "Gee, Leanne has hosted TGIFF twice already this month" you'd be correct 😆 As one of three TGIFF managers (along with Laura and Anja), I take care of making sure the linky party runs smoothly during January, which means stepping up to host when there's no other host signed up. If you blog and you'd like to host the party, there are plenty of open spaces in 2026 and we'd love to have you! You can sign up here (hosting is really easy, I promise!).

And now on with the party! This week I'm sharing the quilt that was actually my last finish of 2025, and the Stash Artists pattern for January, Shining Softly.

Don't ask me why, but in my head Friendship Star blocks have a 'correct' way to lean (to the right, if you're wondering), so having them purposely lean in both directions felt very odd to me. But I love the jewel shape that creates in the space between the stars!

As always, I had fun digging into my stash for the right fabrics for my stars. I did have to buy a few, though, because I didn't have enough pink or purple blenders to not repeat any. Oh darn, right?

I coloured this design a lot of different ways on my computer before I settled on the one I actually wanted to make. While I'm not a huge lime green fan, I feel like it really makes this colour palette sing. And having the colours run diagonally is so much more interesting than if they went straight across.

While I was piecing the stars and assembling the top, I wavered back and forth about how to quilt it. Part of me wanted to do something to highlight the shapes in the negative space, but I couldn't decide what. Another part of me wanted to quilt something swirly to emphasize the way the stars seem to be dancing across the quilt. As you can see, the swirly part of me won. I used Aurifil 1125 50 wt for all of the piecing and the quilting.

I was kind of obsessed with how the sun being low in the sky really made the quilting texture stand out.

I took these pictures the same day I took the pictures of Thread Love, which meant it was a snowshoes-required kind of photo shoot. Since then, we've had even more snow! It's several feet deep in our backyard now, and there's more in the forecast for tonight. It just keep coming!

If you love stash-friendly patterns like Shining Softly, come join us in Stash Artists! We're doing a Mini of the Month series in 2026 along with what I'm calling our 'main' patterns every other month, plus we get together virtually to sew every month. We'd love to welcome you into the community 💖

Now it's your turn! What have you finished recently? Link it up below and be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too 😊

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter