Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Christmas Placemats

Well, December has arrived and Christmas shopping is in full throttle! Happily, the Christmas placemats project was finalized and my customer is thrilled.

I had to make some changes to the original idea that I blogged about back in October. The designs I selected are wonderful, but for this project, they were too dense for the quilting fabric I used. No matter what tricks I tried, there was too much puckering and I didn't think that adding the stipple stitching would help. So, I came up with Plan B.

As you can see in the image below, I opted for appliques in three different Christmas themes, a star, tree and gingerbread. I had digitized the gingerbread design back in 2004, both as a filled embroidery design and an applique. I went back to edit it a bit more for this project, digitized the tree and star appliques and was able to finish the project in record time!



Unfortunately, you can't see the quilting stitches, but I stipple stitched around the appliques and went with a simple stitch in the ditch method for the quilt block area. Rather than competing with the bright fabric colors and matching (or close to it) threads, I opted for invisible thread and it worked out perfectly.

Now that this project has been completed, I'm working on several other projects. One, that I will post a picture later, is a set of Coffee Bean towels with a wonderful coffee themed border. I think that adding a lovely fabric border that matches the theme of the embroidery designs is a great way to finish off a set of towels. The other project is to finish up this lovely FSL Christmas bowl. I actually have several to do, so I'd better get my "thread" on!

Hope you are having a creative day.

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