Yesterday I made a quick trip to my favorite quilt shop to buy some fabric for a holiday lap quilt. Mission accomplished I started perusing the holiday rack and found the perfect fabric for holiday placemats. Seemed like a simple project I could just slip into my run up to Christmas as it would only take a couple hours. Rather than muddy up my weekly to do list I decided to tackle it on Sunday so I could just move on to the lap quilt on Monday. So after my Sunday morning Food Network fix, off I went to my craft room to quickly knock out the placemats.
The fabric cutting went well and my first placemat came out ok so I moved on to placemat two and three. I used the fold over method for the sides binding but needed to make binding for the top and bottom of the placemats. I didn’t have enough fabric for a 1 ¾ inch binding so had to whittle it down to 1 ¼ inches. I have heard there is a gadget to quickly make crisp even binding and, trust me; I am going to purchase it after my two hour project turned into a frustrating seven hour debacle. First off, making and ironing 12 feet of narrow binding made from small stripes of fabric led to several burned fingers. Cutting and making the quilt sandwiches was uneventful until I started using the spray quilt tack to anchor the batting to the fabric. It made an absolute mess of my cutting board, plastic cutting guide, scissors and rotary cutter to say nothing about my fingertips. I don’t know, maybe I bought the wrong stuff but I haven’t had that problem before. I also left too much batting around the edges so when I started folding the narrow fabric binding around the mats with sticky fingers all hell broke loose. I somehow got through placemats two and three but by the time I got to placemats four and five, the sticky batting buildup on my fingertips and the precision with which I needed to place the binding around the mat and sew a straight line was severely compromised.
Needless to say, the seam ripper became my best friend with red threads mixing in with the sticky batting on my fingertips and I was fit to be tied. If it had just ended there I might have survived but placemat number six was calling. So I cleaned up the sticky mess on everything including my fingers and was ready to finish the last placemat when my bobbin ran out of thread. Isn’t that always the way! Anyway, I rethreaded the bobbin and pushed toward the finish line. The final binding just wouldn’t sew on right and I think I seam ripped and remade the thing four times before I finally gave up and got out the glue stick. Pathetic! By then it was dark and Paul called me to supper so I shut it all down, turned out the lights and dizzily made my way to the table starving, dehydrated and defeated. I made my way through supper in a coma after which I plopped down in my easy chair and immediately fell fast asleep.
Obviously, I didn’t get to anything else on my list today but, renewed from my nap, I got out my laptop and wrote this article about the debacle. Paul says the placemats look nice but he’s half blind and didn’t look at the sewing. Hopefully, my Christmas guests won’t either. I am still pulling sticky batting off my fingertips which has even made its way onto my keyboard. I will probably have bad dreams about the whole experience tonight too. Whatever, I just hope I wake up ready to tackle my lap quilt in the morning which, hopefully, won’t end up in another article about my sewing adventures. In the meantime, I have a couple Hallmark movies to take the edge off. Happy Holidays!