Keeping in line with the theme of pulling old projects off the shelf of oblivion, I surprised even myself this afternoon! The earlier part of the day was spent crossing a couple of smaller items off my list, including getting those star blocks pieced together in a finished top:

which, to be fair, looks very much like the photo of the individual blocks displayed on the design wall, found in this post.

And then I took a lunch break, and maybe enjoyed an adult beverage, too;-) So, coming back to the studio I spent some time at the ironing board pressing new fabrics and regrouping. But I was not ready to dive in to one of these new projects just yet.

So, where does that leave us but finding a NOT-SO-NEW project! I don't know if any of you remember these?

a false start I had on that placemat commission that ended up looking like this. Though I had decided that this wasn't right for the client, I still like 'em, so I stowed them away for a bit.

One of the issues that had come up initially is that one of the placemats ended up short. And I didn't have enough of the focus fabric to scrap the large piece and cut a replacement. So, what does one do with 2 discarded placemats, one of which is too small to be useful as such? Why, cut them into a pair of pot holders, of course!!

As for quilting them, I went against the grain (no pun intended). For pot holders I generally use a simple, straight line quilting, because let's be realistic, no one cares how fancy the quilting is on the tool you're using to pull the casserole from the oven, right? But this fabric gets me every time! I was drawn in by the little vines and leaves on the print, and it evolved into an actual feather quilting motif! Who'da thunk it?

And can you believe this was my first foray into free-motion quilting on the Bernina?!? Though I prefer my trusty Viking in SO MANY WAYS, I do have to concede that this machine handled Beautifully with FMQ!! Not even any tension issues on the bobbin thread, which I find inconceivable! However, that said, these might not be so practical as pot holders any more! Just one of the sacrifices we'll make to push our creativity, I guess.

So, the saga of the blue place mats continues, though it's coming together with positive results. As you all may recall, once I finally came up with a solution for the piecework, after quite a journey, the next step was to figure out how I would quilt these guys. I drew a few sketches in my notebook, and decided to try slightly wonky, echoed circles mimicking the print on the border, but at a much larger scale.

Not only did I have trouble doing freehand circles at that scale (especially working at my machine on my dining table, so I only had the throat of the machine as a working surface), but I felt that the motif felt a little too juvenile for the design of the place mats at this stage. Back to the drawing board (quite literally). I still liked the idea of circles, and decided to try my hand at pebble quilting. And how effective it is!!

However, it is also extremely intense on both one's concentration and the muscles from the neck, shoulders and down to the fingers. I find I need to take a break just about every 15 minutes or so, otherwise I start getting sloppy, and it shows! This also requires a LOT of thread! I love how the variegated thread looks with these place mats - I went with Sulky Blendables and am very happy with the outcome. However, these come in 500m spools, and I am about to start on my 3rd spool after quilting just 5 of the 8 mats. Each one is using up about 3 bobbins! I've quilted whole crib quilts with under 2 bobbins' worth of thread!! But darn it, it's going to be worth it when they're done, right??