Some fishy placemats

On Monday I shared two more comfort quilts Monday and I used this fish fabric and the backing fabric. I had a little of the fabric left over and I really hate having scraps. That meant that I needed to come up with a quick project to use it and placemats are one of my go-to projects. Chris is big into fishing, especially off-shore. I got this fabric with because the fish are pretty accurate and I thought I might make him a quilt. I was just never inspired to make a quilt with it. Placemats are a fine tradeoff. He can see his fish while he eats his dinner.

I even used 2 fat quarters from that bin of fabric that I pulled out a couple of weeks ago. That's the yellow and gold trim. The ohter blue is a hand dyed piece from my stash and I used all of it too.
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I make my placemats with flannel from old (but clean) flannel sheets as the batting. It adds just enough weight but doesn't make them fluffy. I also like quilting them pretty heavily so they don't need much ironing. I use a lot of straight line quilting because it's really fast but I wanted a little movement in the ocean and did overlapping wavy lines in the middle. It looks like a lot of work but it went really fast.

I even dyed napkins to match!
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My scrap usage doesn't end with the front of the placemats. Especially when I make them for myself, I try to use my ugly fabrics for the backing. I remember giving some placemats to a friend and I use one of my "uglies" on the back. She sent me photos a few months later to show me how great the placemats looked in her new home. It was the ugly back that matched her decor! They didn't look ugly anymore.
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I had enough fabric to make 8 for 2 sets of 4. I'll give the other est to my nephew because he loves fishing too.
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This weekend I'll be back to practicing my quilting and making the lap quilts. On Sunday I will be totally focused on the Eagles and the Super Bowl and I'm likely to be a little loud.

I'm linking up to Alycia's Finished Friday and Confessions of a Fabric Addict