Reverse Applique Pumpkin Table Runner

This table runner started as an experiment, one of those "let's see how that turns out" kind of moments. And I love how it did turn out.

I wanted to make something a little scrappy and autumn-y for our table for the fall. My Ghostly Greetings runner is a regular on our dining table around Halloween, but I didn't have anything that was just fall-inspired without the Halloween vibe, that could be used for the whole season.

At first I thought about making another Modern Braid because it's quick and easy and fun, but I didn't have enough strips in oranges and browns in my scrap bins. So I switched to "maybe something with a pumpkin?".

I was thinking scrappy pumpkin block, maybe made of 2.5" squares or something. Also quick and easy (similar to the pumpkin version here). As I was going through the scrap bins, the idea to do a strippy, reverse-applique pumpkin started to take shape. So I pulled out all my various strips and figured out that I had probably just about enough to make a couple of good-sized pumpkins.

Fabric choices

I used Essex Linen in natural for the background of the runner, and various strips of orange and copper and rust-coloured fabrics for the pumpkin itself. The backing is a piece of Figo Kingyo fabric I had left over from a previous project. My table runner ended up at about 15" wide and just under a width-of-fabric long, so that half-yard cut I had saved worked perfectly for the backing.

Reverse applique tutorial

A couple of years ago, for the SewPink blog hop, I wrote a tutorial on how to do reverse applique. I was using the same method for this pumpkin, so if you'd like to make yourself a pumpkin table runner or topper, you can follow the steps in this blog post. There is one extra step that I outline below, but otherwise it's the same.

There is no pattern or downloadable file for the pumpkin, because it is larger than a regular sheet of paper, but here's how I created it:

I started out by drawing a pumpkin freehand on a large piece of paper as a template. We still have a partial roll of drawing paper from Ikea from when the kids were little, so this worked perfectly for me.

After drawing it, and adjusting a little until I was happy with the pumpkin, I transferred it to the paper side of some Heat-n-Bond. If you're not comfortable hand-drawing a pumpkin yourself, you can look up images of "pumpkin line drawings" online and use one that you like. Print it out at the size you'd like, or send it to a copy shop to have it enlarged if you also want a large pumpkin, and transfer the drawing to the paper side of your fusible.

Now there is one difference to the heart in the tutorial I linked above: the pumpkin wasn't a single cutout shape, but multiple shapes. Like most pumpkin drawings, it had curved lines to show the indents and bumps of a pumpkin. So I knew if I was going to cut out the inside of the pumpkin so that the scrappy orange fabric would be visible, I would lose those lines.

So instead of cutting it out as a single shape (which you can definitely do if you prefer that look or are using a smaller pumpkin), I widened all the inside lines by adding a generous 1/4" on either side of each line. Then I also did the same between the stalk and the pumpkin itself to ensure that the stalk would become a shape by itself, detached from the rest of the pumpkin. 

After that, it was back to the same procedure as in the tutorial, starting with sewing the scraps together. Then I transferred the heat-n-bond to the background fabric and cut out each pumpkin segment and the stalk individually, leaving the lines between the cutouts. They were a little fiddly, but wide enough to work with and still skinny enough to show as lines and not chunks. 

Then it was time to fuse the two together. Since I wanted my pumpkin stalk to be a different fabric and not part of the orange patchwork, I cut a little piece of the brown fabric first and fused it on before fusing the orange strips in place. There isn't much background fabric between the stalk and the fruit, so it was a little fiddly, and required some trimming with embroidery scissors, but I got there in the end. 

With some of the background fabric strips being quite narrow, they probably wouldn't hold up on their own with repeated use (and washing), so I used a blanket stitch in a matching thread to go around all the shapes after fusing them on. This should hold it well enough so I don't have to worry about anything coming undone. 

Quilting design

I quilted the runner on my new Bernina Q16, my first "real" project after doing a few practice sandwiches. I started out just doing a medium stipple all through the background, because that is a design I knew I would be unlikely to mess up.

Once I got a little more comfortable, I also outlined all the pumpkin segments and the stalks, but didn't quilt over them. This left them a little puffy and I love how that looks now as it makes the pumpkin really stand out. It also added a fun design on the back of the runner.