Placemat Prep

In anticipation of an upcoming Community Service sewing day for our guild, I spent much of my quilting time last week piecing together some placemat tops. The finished placemats will be donated by the guild to the local chapter of Meals of Wheels for distribution to their clients.

The photo above shows just a few of the placemats I've been making. There are more copies of each design, with a total of 19 placemat tops at this time. My starting point for all of these was my box of orphan/leftover and sample blocks. It's funny to see them up on the wall together and realize that they all feature green and orange as main colors. I guess that's a combination I've always liked. Or maybe it's just the color combo I was in the mood to play with last week.

The Ohio Stars placemats were made from sample blocks for a quilt made in 2002 when I was teaching quilting classes. The Ohio Stars quilt was the third in a series of beginning classes, this one featuring quarter-square triangles and setting blocks on point. It took some serious digging through my closet of quilts to locate it, but here is the finished quilt.

Ohio Stars, 47" x 58.5"

The next set of placemats originated from a Super Bowl Sunday mystery quilt-along in 2021. You can read more about that in this post. It was a late decision on my part to join the mystery, and I pulled fabrics quickly from my stash. I wasn't thrilled with the final result, so the blocks were stashed away until they got pulled out last week. I have twelve placemats with these blocks. I especially like the two with the striped fabric running horizontally in the borders, but the vertical stripe was primarily what was available to use.

Most of the fabrics in the above set of placemats were leftover from a quilt I call Boston Fiesta, one of my all-time favorites. I discovered a few leftover blocks from that quilt, plus extra pieces to make even more blocks. I was able to put together a total of twelve blocks, which were turned into three placemat tops.

The Boston Fiesta quilt was started in 2005, but it wasn't finished until 2022. You can read more about it in this post.

Boston Fiesta, 60" x 74"

Most of these placemat tops have been basted to batting. The next step will be to stitch them to backing fabrics, right sides together, then turn right side out and finish them off with some quilting. I still have plenty of work left to do before they are finished.

I'm  linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA