Talking Lunchbox Quilts

I think I have made at least a dozen sailboat quilts.  Whenever I am not sure what to make, I usually just start making sailboats.  I always have a little pile of boats sitting around at any given point in time.  This is my most recent sailboat quilt 🙂

 

There are many ways to make a mug rug – here is one way.

Cut two 9″ x 7″ pieces of batting.  I use one layer of Insul-Bright and one layer of regular cotton batting.  However, two layers of cotton batting would work too.

Take your center piece of fabric and place it in the middle of your rectangle.  No need to pin anything because the fabric kind of sticks to the cotton batting.

Sew a line across the top and the bottom.

Then take your first scrap and sew it across the right side of your center piece.

Finger press the piece open.  Sew vertical lines across this piece.  This is the quilt-as-you-go method.

You will build your scraps clockwise around the center piece, also known as a log cabin pattern.  After each piece is sewn on, finger press it open and sew lines back and forth across that scrap.

Add more scraps – going clockwise.  So basically you will sew a scrap down, finger press it open, sew a few lines across it, then rotate your piece and add another scrap.  You’ll notice that you will have both horizontal lines and vertical lines as you go.

Don’t worry if the outside pieces hang over the edge.  They get trimmed off later.

The entire rectangle is all covered in fabric.

Once your cotton batting 9″ x 7″ piece is completely covered in fabric, you’ll see all that extra fabric.  All you have to do is trim away the extra fabric so that your piece measures 9″ x 7″ again.

Next cut a 9″ x 7″ piece of fabric you want to use as your back.  Pin it to your front piece around the edges and then sew it together by choosing a few places to stitch-in-the-ditch (sewing in an existing seam).

Next you’ll round off the corners.  I used a 4″ circle template, but a small bowl or mug will also work.

Then it is time for the binding.  Binding is not my strong suit!  🙂

Cut a 2 1/2″ piece of fabric – approximately 36″ long.  Fold it in half and then start sewing it around the edge of your piece.  The curves are a little tricky, but just keep your edges matched up.  Also, I like to start the binding on the back of the piece first.

Once your binding is finished on the back, flip it over and sew down the binding on the front.  Since I am not the best binding person, I try to use a thread that blends in with the binding fabric so that you are less likely to see it 🙂

And then TA-DAH…. you have your mug rug!!

While my daughter and husband were out racing sailboats all weekend, I had a grand time making mug rugs for the first time.  I was inspired by Christa Rolf’s book Mug Rugs and a technique from Tara Rebman’s Craftsy Class, Quilt-As-You-Go Patchwork (the potholder class).  Here are my first batch of mug rugs.

My friend brought over a quilt book (Sunday Morning Quilts) that showed this idea.  The author had made their fabric knitting project into a little rug and it looked really cool.  I added a flannel back to each and I use them as both covers for the back of chairs as well as a lap warmer.  They are surprisingly heavy though!  I like the amazing colors and textures.  I added yarn into the mix as well; sometimes with the fabric strips and sometimes sewn on top afterwards.

The gigantic wedge circle was cool looking but I haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.  I decided to try a smaller version instead.  It was less intimidating and easier to work with.

Plus – I had this amazing little box of fabric that I was really excited to use!

Here is the new circle work-in-progress:

Then I had to decide how to attach the circle to a background piece of fabric and close up that donut hole in the middle.  (Mmm…donuts)

 

Working on the next part now.  Maybe a strata block?

This was another really fun class.  I had so much fun playing with the bright red background and all the colorful fabrics.

And a close up

 

My friend Sondra not only does all of the quilting for my quilt tops, but she is also an amazing artist.  Her awesome dragon pieces are among my very favorites.  On a couple of occasions, she has designed a dragon and then I take over from there and make it a quilt to live in.

 

Dragon close-ups 🙂

This quilt was inspired by another design in a Kaffe Fassett book.  I am really into the striped fabrics right now so that was my starting point.  Then I had a lot of fun adding bits of color to jazz it up.  In a bunch of the little bits, I tried to capture the image of what I liked most about that particular piece of fabric, like a cat’s face or a fighting knight, or even just a beautiful color.

As I was finishing up the final border, I ran out of fabric and had to insert a lighter shade from the same fabric collection.  I added the red to help it stand out more and really liked it.

 

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I found this amazing fabric (the solids with a dotted look and texture) and wanted to still play around with the idea of adding pieces of fabric to the squares and rectangles.  I decided to make funky diamond shapes and use those all over the quilt.  

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So working with the wedge ruler is fun and now I have a cool looking circle with a hole in it.  But now the question is – what do I do with it now?  If it had a bigger opening, I could make it into a stylish poncho, (which is so very 70’s!).  Or even better, it could be a cool skirt for my daughter – kind of modern poodle skirt.   I really think she would wear it (tee-hee)!!

Here’s how it looked as I was working on it

This was a fun and pretty simple quilt to put together.  The borders came from my stash and I like how the blue looks with the yellow and red diamonds.  I had originally thought I would need to use a black and white inner border to help with all the yellow and red color saturation.  But when I auditioned the blue for the part instead, I really liked how it looked.

I was also grateful that I made a lot of strata!  Since reading directions isn’t my strong point, I just looked at the pictures and the measurements.  I didn’t give the direction of the diagonal cuts too much thought.  Once I did the cutting I realized that each color needed cuts on different angles for the pattern to work – oops!  Almost had a moment where I would have had to have a little temper tantrum and mutter things aloud that should have been kept to myself.  Fortunately because I had cut so many strata pieces there was no problem after all.  Phew!

Here are the strata rectangles and then the both sets of diagonal cuts.

Sewing everything together didn’t take too long.  The good part was that I read enough of the directions to know that it would be a good idea to starch the strata before making the first cut.  That was very helpful because the fabric didn’t stretch too much.

Adding the inner and outer borders were easy – here’s the finished product 🙂