Trapumpkin!

I had a wild idea this week, to use the traditional trapunto quilting technique to make a dimensional pumpkin that I could frame. 

I found this nice, framed art for a great price. I didn’t care much for the art, but the frame was pretty, and I figured it would work great for this experiment! So, I gathered a bunch of cream and tanish-white scraps and set to work.

I cut a generous piece of background fabric, big enough to fill the frame, plus about 1” extra all the way around. I love stripes, but in hindsight, I wouldn’t use a stripe for this part again, because it was hard to keep it straight. I used this pumpkin template to trace my outline on the background using a water-erasable pen.

I used the water-erasable pen again to trace the different pumpkin “wedges”. I needed the wedges to be free-floating, so a fusible web was not an option for this style of applique. 

I chose different whites and tanish whites for each wedge, layering them into the outline on the background.

I pinned everything into place, just enough to hold it while I stitched around each piece.

This process was a little slow because I was careful not to twist or bunch up the layers. I stitched about ⅛” from the outer edge all the way around each piece.

Now for the fun part! I used my little scissors to cut a slit in the background fabric behind each of the pumpkin wedges.

I used a skinny metal poker to stuff bits of fluffy wool batting into the slits and down each wedge.

Here you can see from the front side, it's all puffed up. The puffiness definitely puckered the surrounding background fabric, so I decided to mount it to a piece of lightweight poster board.

I stitched around each of the pumpkin wedges and the stem from the top through the poster board on the back. 

Once I had stitched the pumpkin to the poster board, I glued the background down to the poster board using an Elmer's glue stick.

The glue and poster board really smoothed things out! Here it is all ready to frame. I glued the poster board to the original art before putting it back in the frame.

And there it is! My new trapumpkin fall art piece 🙂

Happy Sunday, everyone,

Krista

Follow all my quilty adventures on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Visit my YouTube channel for free tutorials and tips. If you like my patterns, you can buy them on Etsy and here on the website.