Suzanne Carillo

I've been wanting to try my hand at applique for a while now. Here is my first try. As you can see it's of my favourite subject, my baby Zoe.

This shows you the drawing I made first to create the applique.

If you want to try your hand at making this cute shopping tote, these are the materials you will need:

my free printable pug pattern
2 different fabrics (one light, one dark)
embroidery floss in black and white
steam a seam applique fusing
black felt
black tote ( I bought this one at Michaels )
2 black buttons
spray on starch

1. Print out the pattern below and get your fabrics ready by ironing them.

2. I sprayed my fabric with some starch before ironing to make sure that it wouldn't fray before pinning and cutting out the pattern from the fabric. When cutting out the pattern leave about 1/4" around the edges.

You could at this point actually pin this onto your Steam-A-Seam as well and cut out the pattern from the fabric and the Steam-A-Seam at the same time. I did it in 2 steps.

3. Pin onto Steam-A-Seam and cut out. Then follow Steam-A-Seam directions ironing on to adhere one side of the Steam-A-Seam to the wrong side of the fabric.

4. Adhere the ears and face by ironing on (you will need to remove the backing of the Steam-A-Seam so that the sticky side will glue onto the other fabric). You should have something that looks like this now.

5. Put the eyes on where you think they should be and then trace around them in a black pen. I also sketched some lines on the pug for the mouth, nose fold, paws and back of leg.

6. Get your embroidery floss and use white to stitch the whites of the eyes. You can stitch the nose fold as well.

7. Cut out your nose from some black felt. This could be attached with Steam-a-Seam as well but I ended up just using the sewing machine to attach it.

8. Add on your black eye buttons. You can add some extra details with black floss around the eyes.