Finished Placemats

I normally do not create picture-heavy blog posts.  If I have a lot of photos, I combine them in a collage.  But this project needs lots of pictures - there's lots of placemats!

I'm glad my sister requested this color scheme.  I love how they look.  It was fun to make the placemats all different, yet they are clearly a matched set.  They will go nicely with the table runner.

Work stopped when I ran out of green thread to finish the last placemat.  I finished them early last week.  I backed the last two placemats with musical mice.  My family will recognize the fabric - it covered some shelves in my nephew's room years ago.  I thought it would be a fun addition to the placemats and went nicely with the green and blue borders.  I quilted a loopy flowery pattern on one.  The last one I quilted starry night.  I need to practice that pattern some more.  The crescents look more like fishing hooks!  Regardless, I'm really pleased with how it came out.

The more patterns I try, the more I realize that freemotion quilting is a lot like handwriting.  I can copy what I see, even following the directions, but my results have a recognizable curve and slant.  It looks a lot like when I doodle the same pattern on paper.  Unless I trace a pattern, nothing I quilt will look exactly like anything I see out on the web.  Which is fine - it's kind of nice to know that even when I copy a pattern it will retain my own style.



The placemats:

And some details.

And that, I think, is enough photos.

I still have a bunch of the material left over.  I may end up making one of the other patterns I liked as a table runner.