Uhg! What Have I Gotten Myself Into!

So I've started work on a very special quilt. My little sister is turning 10 January 16th and I think that she deserves something pretty special. What better than a quilt? I went on a shop hop with some friends in September and purchased all of the blocks to complete the shop hop quilt. because of the color I just knew it had to be for my sister. I have started sewing blocks and they are coming along wonderfully, until I started trying to work on the applique. The quilt has 8 appliquéd blocks from some focus fabric. I thought, hey this should be easy. I love to embroider so why not applique? I'll tell you why not, it sucks.

I read up and found some great tutorials for the needle turn method of applique. I cut out my flowers and leaves and set to work. It is a total pain. Such an agonizingly slow process. I'm trying very hard to make it neat and clean looking, but this is just nuts. Here are my stitches so far.

This is a side view so you can see some of my stitching. From the top it really doesn't look that bad, but I'm so worried it looks messy and horrid. Here is a top view.

Then I found another way. I found a tutorial on using iron on interfacing. Seemed like a great idea. Machine sew around the interfacing on the applique, turn it right side out and have nice neat edges to stitch on. Until I tried it. I have some narrow areas and my interfacing was tearing and not allowing me to turn. I ended up with this.

Not going to work. Uhg. The pattern for the quilt suggests just fusable webbing the applique on and then button hole stitching around them. I'm not a fan of fusable webbing as it gums up the needle of the machine so bad. I also wasn't sure I wanted to machine stitch around these as I'm worried that would look messy as well. I'm just at a loss and the quilt top has to be done by next week so I can take it to the long arm quilter.

Any suggestions on how to stop this crisis and make me smile again?