Rainy Sunday = Sewing Time

I spent a good part of my day yesterday cleaning so I rewarded myself with some sewing time last night and all day today. Well I did cook a meal or two but I mostly sewed today. I'm working on a set of six placemats and napkins at the moment. I finished the tops before I left for Portland but did not pick out a backing or get the batting pieces cut. I looked through my scrap pieces of batting and only found one piece big enough to cut out for two placemats. Then I remembered I purchased some Heat Press Batting Together tape from Sew Sisters.

It was the perfect opportunity to try this stuff out. Especially since it would be on smaller pieces. The instructions are pretty easy. Lay your two batting pieces up to each other, trim if you need to and cut a piece the length of the batting.

And I used my pressing sheet to avoid any of the glue getting on my iron. And you just run it smoothly over the strips. You don't need to be ironing it for long, I found a few seconds on each section did the trick. And if some of it didn't stick, I would just go back over that section for a few more seconds.

Other side of batting piece.

The end result.

I was pretty happy with the result. It takes about 20 minutes to do a small piece like this with a bunch of strips. It did make me feel good to use the batting scraps I have though. So I give Heat Press Batting Together a thumbs up :)

After getting all my backing pieces and batting done, I started putting them together. Then came the quilting. I had decided to quilt the strips with straight lines 1/4" apart. I finished three placemats last night before I went to bed...

I loved how the quilting turned out on the backing.

Then when I was laying in bed, I felt like they needed more quilting. So this morning, I decided to quilt diagonal lines on just the brown/red floral print.

And check out the quilting on the backing!

I am so happy with the way the quilting turned out. The Floral print is still the center of attention but the quilting is great in the background. And the quilting just fills up the backing. It's a bit more work since I have six to do but nothing that can't be managed. I have finished quilting two of the six placemats....only 4 more to go.

Hope you all had a great weekend :)

Keep calm and quilt on!


J.