Placemats

We have to bring two quilted placemats 12X18" to our next guild meeting in October to donate to Meals On Wheels.  I had leftover fabric from my "Cloud 9" quilt that I thought would make some pretty ones; I could envision the teal quilting showing up on the reverse (I'd already decided on black).  Three things happened: first I saw something on a shop wall in the Quilt Sampler Fall issue, second, making those hotpads gave me an idea as to how to finish the placemats with that self-binding, and third, seeing a quilt on Quilting is More Fun Than Housework just made all those thoughts gel together.  Great news for these menopausal scatterbrained-melon days!!

So they are both finished today and ready to take with me to Tuesday night's meeting.  :-)  Now the only other "to-do" for the meeting is to put a stripe on my orphan block.  Here are the placemats:

I FMQ-ed on my Bernina.  Good to do that again, as I have concentrated solely on my Avanté.

My oops.  (where the pin is) In Melanie Dramatic's instructions on Moda Bakeshop, which is where I learned her cool method of bringing the backing to the front and "self-binding" the quiltlet, she warns us to be very careful if trimming the front and batting.  Well, I thought I had folded back the backing as far as possible...apparently not.  To my horror I had put a 3" slash in the black fabric.  I stewed about this stupid mistake for a day and a half or so, made the other placemat in the meantime, and today, I tackled the section that I'd sliced by piecing in a strip.  It worked out quite nicely after all--phew! See below:

Here is the back view so you can see my fancy motifs in the black squares.  The fossil snail is one of Leah Day's designs, the swirl and pebbles is one of Angela Walters', the leaf is based on a leaf of Kathy Sandbach's, and the heart echo, fish (I'm proud of her scales!) and starfish are my own.

 Close-up of the black squares on the front.  I cut the squares 2.5" so they'd finish at 2'. After I'd cut over 54 squares, I realized I was probably not going to have enough to do the 2 placemats, so I decided to put in three 4.5" squares to save fabric, and it worked out great!

I like these so much that I think I'm going to have to make some (in a different fabric since I have no more of this left) for myself.  Possible Christmas presents are also percolating...