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My local quilt shop has a first Saturday of the month mini project. Basically you pay $5 for the first month and then every month you bring in the completed work, you get the next “project” for free. The winter and spring are usually six blocks that can be put together for a throw. The woman, Terry, who always designs these is very good, although I do not always agree with her color choices. July, Aug and Sept are taken off and then Oct, Nov and Dec are sort of mini projects. She shows you a design and then you can finish it however you like. She always has ideas on what to do with the design.
This October it was a pattern on making a branch of autumn leaves. She had suggestions on how to use it for a table runner or a center piece, but as soon as I saw it, I thought place mats.
The design in the class was for making a branch of six staggered leaves. It starts out pretty simple by cutting squares for half-squares triangles (HST) that will be 2.5” square before sewing. One light and one darker in autumn colors. Below is the fabric we got.
I thought the rust and the red were too close in color so I substituted a more orange light and dark square.
With the two squares, right sides together, do a standard sew 1/4” on both sides of a center diagonal line to create the HST. Remember that to finish at 2.5” the squares need to be larger than that. I always cut them oversize and trim them down.
After you have the HST, you put a 1.25” black square (in this case) in opposite corners of the HST as shown below. Draw a diagonal line from corner to corner parallel to the center seam and sew directly on it.
Next fold the squares in half on the diagonal sewing line.These folded corners are really small. What the teach said is not to cut under flaps, but only cut out the middle layer so you will have the bottom original layer as a sewing guide.
Now you start to sew each side of the leaf branch. One side will have a 2.5” wide by 1.25” high piece of black fabric on the bottom, then a leaf, then a 2.5” by 1.0” spacer of black fabric, then another leaf, then a spacer, etc. as shown below. The second side will have the 2.5” X 1.25” spacer at the top. This is so the leaves will be staggered. You need to remember to keep your leaves pointing up as you do this.
Now for all the projects the teacher suggested, she had a brown flange in the middle. I didn’t want a flange on a place mat so I cut a 0.75” piece of brown fabric and did a narrow branch. You can’t see the branch very clearly here, but it’s there.
From there it is a simple matter of putting a border (I used 1.25”) on the right and left of the leaves, choosing a center fabric. I choose one that was used in the leaves — the golden yellow. Doing a top and bottom border (1.25” black here) and then an outside border, which obviously I chose an autumn leaf fabric. I didn’t do a binding on this as I did not want anywhere to catch crumbs, etc. I just put a layer of batting on top of the right side of the place mat and the lining right side down and sewed around 3.75 of the way around and then turned it and slip stitched the opening closed.
The quilting was quite basic — around the borders and the leaves. I started doing more quilting in the middle but it wasn’t working out so I decided not to do any quilting there.
So that is the project. It may seem a bit much for place mats, as the leaf section is 31 pieces, but I like the results.
So what are you quilting?