I was digging through my pile of started and great idea projects that remain unfinished and I found these placemats that I had started about 10 years ago. I liked the blue back then and I still liked the blue but I knew that just finishing with stitch-in-the-ditch quillting, though very easy and fast to do, wasn’t going to satisfy me.
I often looked at and admired Sashiko (form of Japanese hand embroidery using the running stitch to create a pattern made almost entirely with dashed lines) quilts. Now I knew I was never going to be patient enough to do hours and hours of hand embroidery, so I improvised using my unfinished placemats.
I used my BabyLock Solaris with both Upgrade 1 and 2 installed, however this can be done with any machine that has IQ Designer and fills. All the fills I used, I believe are on the Solaris without either upgrade. The BabyLock Meridian and the Altair also have IQ Designer but I am not familar with the fills on those machines, but I am sure they have some great fills that could be used as well. This project pushed me to use some of the fills that I had looked at and admired but never really used and if I did use them I always enlarged them. So this gave me a chance to make those great fills smaller and the real focus of the project.
To create my placemats I cut 6- 4 1/2” squares (3 of each shade of blue and sewed them together alternating the blue shades.
First row: light blue, dark blue, light blue
Second row: dark blue, light blue, dark blue
Then I stitched the 2 row together and added a border on all four sides that I cut 2 3/4” wide
My finished placemat measure 12 1/2” x 16 1/4”.
After I pressed all my seams and the wrinkles and crease lines from being in the UFO box for all those years , I pressed my placemat front to a piece of fusible fleece with the fusible side next to my place mat front. I like to use a piece of fusible fleece larger than my project.
I hooped a piece of no-show mesh stabilizer, (my personal favorite is the BabyLock Cut Away NO-SHOW FUSIBLE MESH). Then I pinned my placemat top which has a fusible fleece already adherred to it on to my stabilizer.
Using Magnetic hoop from DIME 10 5/8” x 16”, hooped just my stabilizer
Stabilizer hooped with fusible fleece and placemat top pinned to stablizer
Finished the placemats by adding a backing. With right sides together of my backing and the front of my placemat I stitched all the way around leaving an opening for turning right side out. Once I had the placemat turned right side out, I gave it a quick press and did a stich-in-the-ditch between my squares and my border and did a final top stitch all the way around close to the edge of my placemat which closed up the opening I left for turning
All finished and I think these placemats look a lot better finished and on my table then they did buried in my UFO pile.
Next do I go back to the UFO pile or start a new project? Decisions, decisions…….