Quilting the placemats

I spent a lot of hours the past few days getting a presentation ready for my quilt club. I try to commit to doing one program each year and this year I put together a presentation of some of the veterans quilts that we have made, hopefully to give people ideas for new quilts. I did the presentation last night and if you have time to kill and want to see some of our veterans quilts, you can see the presentation here. 

After I ran through it in the morning I had a few hours free and decided to load and quilt the newest placemats. I'm so glad to finally have my machine adjusted because it quilted with the trilobal polyester threads perfectly! I'm also really comfortable doing any adjustment on my machine now so it should never be frustrating again.
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I found a leftover backing strip that was the perfect width for me to be able to load and quilt all 4 placemats at the same time. I've mentioned this before, but I'll say again that I use old (clean) flannel sheeting for the batting on placemats. I don't like my placemats to be puffy. I want them beefy and flat. The flannel works perfectly and I have a closet shelf of flannel available for free.
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I started with ruler work in the chevron. I just love ruler work. It's my comfort blanket of quilting.
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My other quilting crutch is free-motion filler so I decided to do fillers in the gray background. I did a different filler on each placemat. This is the first one and it's one that I turn to often.
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The second one is this one that's called coffee bean. It's a lot of fun to stitch.
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The third design is one that I've never done before but it was a lot of fun to quilt. You stitch the line first and then do the crossing stitch back and forth. Super fast.
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This was the last one and my least favorite. Placemats are so perfect for practicing because any crappy quilting will likely be covered by a plate or spaghetti stain.

Today I will load and start quilting the baby quilt and will try to get these trimmed and pick a binding fabric.  In a few weeks I'll dye some napkins to match.
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On Monday I went to Hobby Lobby to look for some fabric for a quilt project that I'm going to take on vacation. I actually did buy 3 yards of fabric (at 40% off) but a stroll through the yarn aisle revealed that they were having a 75% clearance! This even usually happens in June but, for whatever reason, it's in March this year. Last year I only bought 2 different yarns but I got a few more this year. The big pile on the left is a yarn that's exactly like Lion Brand Feels Like Butta. It's perfect for chemo hats and it was .99 a skein. I got all of it except white and gray because I have plenty of those colors. The red and blue are acrylics for donation blankets. The 2 in front are a 1 weight. I want to try crocheting with a 1 weight yarn but it's often kind of expensive and I think my chance of success is 50/50. These were only $2.50 so if the project is a fail I won't feel so bad. 

No more yarn needed! I did finish another of the big blankets. I'll try to get a photo today to share tomorrow.