Spring Placemats

Place mats seem to be my go to gift for my parents.  So it is not surprising then that I choose to make another pair of them for my mom's 65th birthday.  Of course I have other stuff as well, but I always like to have one handmade gift to add to the pile.

Mom and Dad - Happy B Day

 Back in March my LQS had some Fandango fabric by Kate Spain.  Some of it I used to make cathedral windows pillow (still in progress cause I am hand stitching it), the rest I put aside to make place mats for this birthday.  I added to it some orange dots by Riley Blake, and some other fabrics in my stash and have this scrappy looking mats. 

Place mats for two

 The back is the Fandango print, as is the carry case for them.  Though I did put a band of Riley Blake fabric on it to give it an extra pop. The carry case is nothing special, just fabric sewn up the side to corral all the place mats and keep them in one spot.  Now all that remains to do is pop them into the mail! 
 

Carry Case for place mats

Fandango Bits

Kate Spain came out a while ago with a line called Fandango which is a wonderful mix of lively orange, green, white, turquoise and yellow.  I find it so pretty and fresh that when I saw some scrap bags full of this fabric I bought myself two at my local store, The Cloth Castle.  Of course the annoying thing is the fabrics that I see and would like some are often ones that my local store doesn't have on its radar or takes so long to get in that it is out of stock in the US by the time it comes to Canada.  Good for those folks in the States who are looking for fabric no longer easily found there, you might be able to find it here!

easy cathedral windows

Anyways I decided that I would make two things out of all these scraps.  The first, some place mats for my mom, cause I think she will really love the colors and the second.... well lets say I was stumped for a bit, until I went to my " I wanna make this someday" file and saw the pattern for cathedral windows.  Since it takes small bits and I wanted a uniform look from a sole fabric line, I thought it would work well for Fandango.  As I am not interested in watching the Stanley Cup playoff, even if its my provinces home team, I sat down after supper and started pressing and folding, steaming and more steaming little packets to form the windows.  After two hours and four episodes of NCIS reruns I had enough for a pillow top.  I need to spend time tomorrow after work tacking down these babies cause I don't think Air Canada will let me on the plane with these pins.  Hopefully this will be enough to keep me occupied on my flight from Victoria to Ottawa.  Can you say painfully long. I know not as bad as flying to Australia or Japan but long none the less.  For those of you interested in the tutorial I found for this, it is here.  I found the tutorial easy to understand and put together.  I like that when that happens.