Countdown to Grand Give Away 2016 – 7 weeks.
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1 Million Mile Quilted Postcard Challenge update: The theme for April is “Work of My Hands”. April cards are about handwork. Dust off your old needle/threads and make a stitch or two on a postcard. After all, 4″ x 6″ isn’t all that big. 🙂 My reveal will be the last Wednesday of the month; stats and locations will be the first Wednesday of each month.
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I love walking into my sewing room and finding the perfect fabric for 
the project I have in mind. This time I needed some quick hostess gifts. A friend suggested placemats, and remembering the ones I made at Christmas, I decided it may be possible as long as I didn’t have to go shopping for fabric.
The fabric I found in my stash was a bundle of 15 fat quarters in different shades of yellow, orange, gold and brown. Perfect spring 
colours. Since they were fat quarters with no duplicates, I had to make the placemats as scrappy as possible. All the backs are different, and do not match any of the fabric in the front.
The first thing I had to do was make sure I had enough fabric for the back. The remainder could be cut into pieces for the front. I was able to 
get 3 pieces from each and ended up with 12 placemats, although I had to add extra to complete the last 2, and for use on the binding.
At Christmas I did a lot of quilting on each placemat. For the sake of time I decided to simplify and just quilted them with the feather stitch on my 
machine (using a walking foot). A friend (thanks! – you know who you are) helped with the binding.
This pattern is called Triplets, by Chloe Anderson and Colleen Reale and can be found in Quilter’s World (A Quilted Christmas, December 2015). It goes together very quickly and is so versatile. It was the perfect size to practice free motion embroider on, but its also nice with normal decorative stitching. If you want to make 
some placemats, I would highly recommend this pattern.
Have a creative week. Thanks for stopping by.
Judy's Quilting Studio 