Posted by dravon in LiveJournal, Project Review | Comments Off on Meals-On-Wheels Placemat #1
Meals-On-Wheels Placemat #1
The San Fernando Valley Quilter’s Association which I recently joined has a whole lot of charity work that they do. One of them is making placemats for the Meals-On-Wheels program. At every meeting, they have a box full of ‘kits’, which actually amount to 2 pieces of cotton fabric and some batting, which you can take so that you can make the placemat. Figuring that this would be a great way to practice some skills and have a home for the finished product while not being obligated to making a full set of 4 or 8 of them, I picked up 2 kits.
One kit featured a traditional quilted maple leaf square as one of the fabrics. It wasn’t big enough to do an entire face of a placemat with that, and I didn’t want to make more leaves to go with it. I laid out the material and tried different things and then hit upon an idea. I’m actually very excited by this because it’s one of the first times I’ve come up with a creative design that was all mine. I didn’t copy/modify it from somewhere else! That may sound like a ho-hum thing, but I was very excited by this new aspect of creativity.
Anyway, here’s the design all finished:
I’m also thrilled that the quilting came out reasonably nice. This was the first time I used my new walking foot and it went very well, even on those maple leaf points in which I was turning the fabric all over the place to follow the points of the leaf. There were only a couple of whoops, and those are very clear since I challenged myself to use dark purple thread on the white to make sure that I was stitching reasonably straight lines. I decided to leave the off-white surrounding the leaf itself unquilted, giving that area a slightly puffy look which adds some dimension and softness to the piece. So there’s the organic leaf with the softness of no quilting surrounded by quilting, contrasted by the angles and line quilting. Overall, I think it came out very nicely.
It took me a while to decide on what border to use. I like the brown I chose because I think it ties together the whole piece nicely, given the variety of colors and styles used. In terms of creativity, it’s rather nascent looking but for a first actual real design all of my own making, I’m happy with it.
Here’s the back. That fabric is what was provided in the kit. Looks like I have it upside down. Oops! I so did not notice that until I saw the picture of it. *lol*
While at the quilt show held at the end of May, I found the rulers that allow for those interlocking diamonds. I LOVED the look, so I bought both sizes of the rulers. As I was working out what to do with the placemat, I saw in my mind’s eye a row of the interlocking diamonds which I’ve executed as you can see. It was the first time I worked with those diamonds. The first strip ended up too short, but it was too pretty to just throw away so I made it into a cloth bookmark for Michelle our housemate. I used the same brown binding and that project also turned out nicely but I’m not going to post-mortem that one since it was the learner for this one. Overall, the diamond ruler worked amazingly well. The only thing I’ll have to keep in mind is where I’m going to use them so that I can make sure I have enough surrounding fabric to actually execute the plan.
