eating in style

It has been a while since I finished a project! These are a set of eight placemats for a stylish dining experience. Ok, maybe not stylish but fun for sure. 

I started sewing teeny tiny squares of fabric together back back in February I think. I wanted to use up small bits of fabric that I couldn't bring myself to through out. These are one inch squares. I am firmly a metric person usually, but my quilting ruler is imperial so all quilting is done in inches. At first, I wasn't sure what I was making. I thought of a baby quilt, or maybe a bigger quilt... then I remembered placemats I had made for my mum a couple of years ago and decided that this just the right thing to make. I had a special friend in mind for those. Whenever we go for dinner, the table is nicely set with placemats. Do you remember those blissful days when dinner parties were a possibility? Not here in Glasgow, not now. We are not currently allowed to socialise indoors with friends or family we are not sharing a house with. I miss this very much, having dinner with friends is just about my favourite social activity, topped maybe by camping with friends or having a barbecue with friends. 

Ah well. I backed the placemats with blue chambray fabric that I purchased many years ago to make a shirt dress. I used most of it to back Alistair's quilt a while back. I quilted zigzag lines to hold the layers in place. 

I wanted to bind the placemats with a single fabric but I didn't have enough of any to make the amount of binding needed. Instead, I cut strips of my almost plain fat quarter collection. I think the line is Makeover Linea, it comes in all shades of the rainbow and then some. I don't like to use solid colours and this line is just right for me. 

To make sure the placemats could go through wash regularly, I decided to machine sew the binding. I used a method described by Rachel at Stitched in Colour, she uses a zigzag stitch to sew the binding down. I prefer hand stitching for this final step, I think it is the best part of making a quilt, but these placemats need to be robust. I actually rather like this zigzag method, it is quick and I think it adds a little bit of interest to the binding. 

Now that these placemats are finished, I really want to keep them (but I won't). I hope my lovely friend likes them, she is a bit less crazy than me and maybe the medley of fabrics is too much. And maybe, just maybe, in the not too distant future, we'll have dinner together chat about our respective favourite squares in the placemats. 

Thanks for visiting today!