A Placemat Project
Weather is finally getting cooler here. I love fall weather. It has always been my favorite season. I grew up in a home “in the woods”, surrounded by large shade trees. We had oak trees, ash trees, elm trees and at least five varieties of maple trees. Every fall was a riot of color.
The maple tree in my front year here in Missouri is starting to hint at changing color. It will be awhile before Missouri is in full color.
Working on the Long Arm
Aside from running errands and getting some work done around my house the past couple of days, I spent my time with SusieQ. We worked on some Halloween themed placemats.
This project is the Skill Builder lesson from August 2019. I know, its about time to get them quilted. This lesson used four placemats to teach a variety of techniques and skills including:
- Apply
- Concatenating Draw Patterns
- Placing background patterns using Draw Pattern to stitch continuous
- Creating border patterns from P2P Square patterns
- Saving Patterns
- Multi-use of patterns
Easy Placemat Pattern
The pattern for this project is quite simple. Select four of your favorite block patterns in a 12” finished block size. Add 3” finished borders to each side of the block. That’s it. Easy-Peasy.
Sawtooth Star Placemat
I ended up making eight placemats. When I was getting ready to quilt them, I couldn’t decide on using black thread or orange thread. So, I made four with orange thread and four with black thread. Yes, I could have made thread changes, but I didn’t want to take the extra time that would add to the project.
Piano Key Borders
The Sawtooth Star uses a basic piano key pattern in the side borders. The Piano Key pattern is a good choice for borders, especially when the borders are a busy fabric pattern. It provides well-spaced quilting that won’t detract from the beauty of your fabric print.
The tricky parts of stitching out Piano keys are getting them to line up straight and placing the end of the key either “in the ditch” or “on the edge”. I chose to place mine on the edge. It takes some practice to get the key ends to fall right where you want them.
Creative Studio is the computer software I use with my long arm machine. Apply is a feature used for placing patterns along a line, curve, or other object. For the borders here, the patterns are placed along a vertical line using Apply.
Background Squares and Triangles
The corner squares and side triangles in the Sawtooth star are quilted with a curl and pearl design and a triangle curl and pearl design. Draw Pattern is a tool in the software that places designs in a specific location on the quilt top. With Draw Pattern, you can click across the quilt, placing the patterns in a continuous manner, so they stitch out in one sequence.
Concatenating is a technique that combines two or more patterns in a sequence. For this placemat, I combined a corner design and a triangle design to stitch out the orange corner squares and plaid triangles in one pass around the star. I used a three-pearl design for the black thread placemat and a single-pearl design for the orange thread placemat.
The Star Points
Next up, the star points. This time I concatenated two triangle patterns that mirror each other so that they fell in the correct direction in the triangles. Again, I used a different design for each thread color placemat.
The Center
Rather than selecting a single block design for the center, I created a new design using the same pattern I selected for the orange corners. By arranging four copies of the design in the corners of the square, the combination creates a new design.
This placemat packed a lot of learning and practice into one little project. Yes, it is a lot of time and thought for quilting a small 12” x 18” project, however, practice is good. The skills gained are useful for future projects. I hope you enjoyed this peak into the process of long arm quilting a project.
What are your current projects?
Until till next time,