Home Goods

Although I'm not participating in it, the {Urban} Home Goods Swap has (not surprisingly) produced all sorts of lovely gifts -- quilts, small and large; placemats; table runners; bags; pillows; and more. Clicking through the images and reading blog posts about items made and received has been quite inspiring.

I made a set of placemats and coasters for my sister's wedding shower last weekend. I'd never made quilted coasters before, so this was a chance to experiment.

I started with a slightly wonky log cabin, quilted it, and cut it into quarters, as you would for a Bento Box quilt. The cutting was a tad tricky because I was hastily finishing them at my parents' house where I could use my mom's sewing machine but had no access to a rotary cutter. Scissors it had to be, and I made do.

I bound each coaster in a different black and white fabric. Coaster binding was a little harder than I anticipated. When I first started quilting, I loathed binding. Over time, I've gotten quite comfortable with it and don't mind it at all. However, the small sides of coasters meant that my usual technique for sewing together the 2 ends of the binding strips didn't work (or I'm not dexterous enough to make it work) so I went with a slight overlap which produced additional bulk. But I think I'm more aware of that than most users of said coasters will be, or at least I hope that's the case.

I pieced the placemats in a mostly improv fashion, using strips from my scrap bin. Red, white, and black were givens as the colors since that's my sister's favorite color combination. I confess I started with no vision. Given the time constraints, I knew simple was key and they would coordinate but not match. Because they're not matchy-matchy, I decided that using the same fabric for the binding would help bring them together.

I used the pattern on the backing fabric as a guide for quilting. For the first time, I quilted from the back -- following the lines (sort of) of the black and white fabric and not knowing exactly how it would appear on the front. I like the results a lot, but I think this method worked because it was a pretty simple and regular quilting design. The curved lines are not exactly the same as one another but they are the same distance from one another.