Helen your hummingbird and flower wall quilt is just gorgeous and amazing! Thank you for the extra detail and advice.
Yes Alex said the same thing in her Monday video… Blanket stitch first and then quilt, or if you have a lot of small or skinny pieces, do overall quilting on the quilt sandwich, and then you can selectively edge stitch on top after.
A question for you Helen… So that means that your large section of flowers is only held onto the quilt by zigzag on the edge? Do you recommend that this is only for a wall hanging and not something that will be used and washed?
HelenW wrote:

Just got my supplies yesterday. Have been searching for fabrics from my stash already . Ready to get started. I did a young girl when I was in collage...a thousand years ago! It was not a free as what you are doing now. I enjoyed that one and now I can get crazy with this one.

roxannecooper wrote:

Roxanne, I would do the decorative stitching first before sandwiching. Like another quilter mentioned, it is hard not to distort the decorative stitches as you maneuver
around the edges with the batting bulk. This is not a face, but on this wall hanging I quilted the background first with out anything on it. I built the appliqués on parchment paper assembling them as a unit and then put tear away stabilizer behind them. Decorative stitched the raw edges of all pieces except the outside perimeter edge. Fused it to the quilted wall hanging; edge stitched the
applique perimeter using a 1.0 1.0 zig zag stitch in the color thread to match the applique fabric. Then binded it and added crystals to the top for some Bling. HelenW


In your situation I would use tear away stabilizer or light weight fusible (I use Pellon 906 sheer wt. fusible stabilizer) do the decorative stitches you want to put on it, then do the remaining edges with a 1.0 1.0 zig zag (you can bearly see it). You can match the threads or use clear so you don't have to change out thread colors. Then sandwich the block.
Echo stitch right around the edge of the body and face with hair. Then quilt the remaining areas as desired. Love you face!!! HelenW

I blanket stitch before adding batting and .backing, I do use a tear away stabilizer.
Response to CLprince question

OMG, these are so awesome.

I'm a bit confused about the quilting part. The choices are overall or securing the edges using [insert method] and then quilt?

What are people doing? I would love to see examples. And if you were me, what would you do with this?

My face still needs a wardrobe choice - that’s for tomorrow!

First try, not finished. Having a fun time making my very first quilt!

2star wrote:
2star -

As with everything quilting, you can do it whichever way you want to get the look that you want. But, in general, if you are going to use decorative stitches to secure the edges of your applique then you would do that before sandwiching and quilting. There are several reasons for this: because it's hard to get the sandwiched quilt evenly under the feed dogs so your decorative stitches can get distorted and because a lot of decorative stitches are wider and will create wider channels of flattened areas in the puffy quilt sandwich that may not be the look you are wanting. After securing your appliques, you'll have to make some quilting design decisions. You can quilt the quilt with an overall pattern, like the straight lines that Alex used, and ignore the applique edges in the quilting. Or you can quilt around the edges of the appliques using the quilting to further accentuate the applique. For the hair, if you are talking about sewing free-motion swirls to accentuate the hair, you can do that either before or after sandwiching the quilt. If you are doing an all-over quilt design, then I would probably stitch the swirls with a decorative thread before sandwiching. If you are customizing the quilting to the applique by quilting around the applique, I would probably stitch the hair swirls after sandwiching, so it becomes part of the quilting, to add texture and to add needed quilting to a larger applique piece. But it all really comes down to the look you want to achieve. Whatever you do, enjoy the process!

Barbara 1259 I am planning on using decorative stitches instead of blanket stitch on the outside edges of the face & neck & blouse & not sure what I am going to do with the eyes,etc. I am going to use swirls on the big pieces of fabric but what stitch could I use on the face, neck & blouse if I don't want to use straight stitching? In order for me to use my decorative stitching as I have in some I will have to do the quilting first? I am confused.

KMICHAEL, I moved your post here to the Topic for FACES. Please don't Create A New Topic. Come to this Topic--easy to find under RECENT TOPICS--and Reply Topic to post here.

I am having great fun doing my face, I am sure I will make more too, This is it so far hope to get more done tomorrow but the cutting part is slow for me due to arthritis in both hands, but I will catch up, eventually

I want to blanket stitch then quilt. Do we blanket stitch BEFORE adding batting and backing to quilt?