Trapunto Quilting - Raised Designs for Garments

Trapunto quilting is a technique used to created raised designs on garments, quilts and fabrics used for decorating. It is popular in quilt designs, but also in garment structure as a raised impression to a design that may or may not be colored or appliqued (can simply be a monochromatic raised design). To create the raised designs, different methods are employed:

• The design can be manually stuffed with very small bits of batting or fiberfill until the area is raised ad required or desired for the design (see the technique here from allpeoplequilt.com).
• The design can be threaded carefully with raised threading or yarn through the area. This generally requires a lightweight fabric for the underside of the design. The basting is done with very small stitching and yarn is threaded through each stitchline. The yarn is clipped close to the stitchline before being threaded again with a new line above or below the previous yarn.

Here is an example of a trapunto quilt with leaf patterns:

Image courtesy of Stella Blue, Flickr.com

Renee Shelton.