applique designs can they be used without fabric & just stitched out kind of like an outline? Or is it better to leave them as there are intended?

thank you Ladies I went ahead & did it like this

This will be a question of design and fabric. Your cloud from the project side looks nice without applique on a one color fabric, but not on a multicolored fabric. If you can resize only the satinstitchline to a smaller one (in embird may be), nobody will see that it was an applique design.

I think the design itself would need to be carefully chosen, but yes, you certainly could do that. I'd skip the die line and the tack down steps as unneeded and added bulk.

I do both sometimes I only want outline when I am doing rag quilts. Just try it and see how it looks.