Mother's Day gifts

Phew! Lots of projects getting finished around here! A couple of them have been secrets, so I've not shared them here on the blog, they may have sneaked their way into Instagram though!

So today is all about place mats. But you'll need a little catch up first.

Waaaay back in April last year, I made a table runner for my mum. She bought all the fabrics, told me what she wanted, I just provided the stitches. It was massive, 2.5m long - she has a big table! I blogged about it here. At the time there was some talk of matching place mats, but, you know how it is. Time slips by, other projects come along, so many other projects.

But then with the hand-made-gift-giving of 2014 I decided that the matching place mats would be a good Mother's Day present. So I dug out the fabrics I had left, took a little trip out to poppy patch where we had bought the fabrics a whole year ago. 

I held my breath a little bit. What if they didn't still have any of the fabrics? What would I do? I understand that, in reality, this is not a MAJOR PROBLEM. But at the time, in my little fabric blur it was AN ISSUE. Fortunately, there was no crying in the fabric shop, they had the exact same backing, the exact same binding and even my choice of extra fabrics for the middle of the mats - PHEW!!!

I set to work using this great tutorial and in next to no time I had 8 place mats :)

I went for easy-peasy straight line quilting, not too close together (I was starting to run out of time!)

I stitched down the fronts of all 8 binding strips, and then began the glorious task of hand-stitching the back of the binding. Just in case anyone thinks I'm being sarcastic here, I'm not. I love this bit. Tiny, neat, hidden stitches all around the back - heaven! 8 times - bliss!!!

Of course, Henry helped A LOT. With every stage, including photographing.

So that's it, 8 place mats all finished. I bundled them into some wrapping paper and took them to my mum's on Sunday. I'm pretty sure she liked them, I left her planning a dinner party.....