One day last week I was on the phone with our friend Nancy at Wonderfil Threads. I was telling her that I wish there was a good solution for hand applique-ers, a way to get lots of different colors of hand applique thread in small quantities. I’m currently teaching a session of hand applique for beginners, and I feel bad telling people that they need to buy a spool of Mettler Fine Embroidery (my personal favorite for hand applique) in every color they have in their piece. Of course, the greedy capitalist in me loves it, but I don’t want the expense of this to put anyone off. So Nancy asked me if I’d tried using Invisafil for hand applique. She told me that several big-name applique teachers have switched over to it and are very pleased with the results. Well, I’ll try anything once. Sometimes even more than once! 
So I went home that evening and dug a piece of black background (Michael Miller’s Jet, my favorite black fabric) out of my stash, and two scraps of fabric. One is a handdyed piece, sort of a rusty color, and the other is a multi colored Kaffe Fassett print that included bright red amount other colors. I was going to use light blue Invisafil, so I was deliberately setting myself us for failure by choosing colors that wouldn’t blend well with light blue. I cut a couple of blobs out of these two fabrics and sat down to applique while watching TV. Not great light, I was tired, and I’m not sure if I was wearing glasses. So I didn’t expect good results. Well, was I ever surprised!
Invisafil is a 100 weight (that means extremely fine) polyester thread. In the “olden days” we were told not to uuse poly in quilting projects because it was too strong and could eventually cut through cotton fabrics. That’s no longer the case. The poly is strong, yes, but Invisafil breaks at about the same stress point as Mettler Fine Embroidery (according to my very controlled, scientific study in which I pulled a piece of thread between my hands – in the olden days, the poly would have cut my skin before it would break). Invisafil has no lint, because it’s poly. It doesn’t fray or show wear from the abrasion of the needle eye or being repeated pulled through the fabric. I know that many applique-ers like silk for hand applique, but I’ve never liked it – it’s too shiny and no matter what they say, the stitches show. Invisafil is slightly shiny, too – not like PolySheen, just like you would expect a matte poly to be – but it’s not so shiny that it won’t disappear.
So, here’s a picture of my masterpiece, scanned to include all the rotten detail. There’s also a piece of tape holding on a length of the thread so you can see how thin it is! I think that if I’d made any effort at all to come close to matching the color I was stitching on – even if not the same color, but just the righit tone or value – my stitches would be invisible. Which, of course, is the goal. We have small spools of Invisafil in multi-packs, and I think I’ll start suggesting that to my applique students as a good alternative. Just a few colors – black, white, a couple of beige/browns and a couple of greys – may be very well all they need!
If you want to try this for yourself, please bring in something to wind a few yards off onto (even just wrapping it around an index card!) and we’ll give you some to try. We won’t wind a whole bobbin of it on our bobbin winder, as this thread is fine and that will take forever (that’s what makes it a great bobbin thread), but you could bring a bobbin and wind some onto it by hand. Please give it a try and let us hear your feedback!
~Joyce
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