Why not make some placemats

Well, this is incongruous with anything I've been doing here on the blog lately but it was just another project hanging around the sewing room that needed to be cleaned up. I almost put it in a pile but, for once, decided that the best action would be to take a couple of hours and finish it.

This project started with 2 rolls of grosgrain ribbon. The Longarm Network, for some reason, has these rolls of grosgrain ribbon on the store for $10 each. That's such a bargain that I had to get some! They don't have them on the website but if you want some I'm sure you can contact them through the link and get yourself some. My first thought was to weave then in some way.

Then a week or so later someone brought some rolls of decorator weight fabric to the quilt club meeting. One was a roll of natural denim. A project idea was born!

I think I cut the denim to about 13" x 18" allowing for a 1/2" hem on all sides. I drew some guidelines for ribbon placement. There are 3 guidelines 1 1/2" from the bottom and right edges and 1 1/2" apart for the other 2. Then I pinned the ribbons aligning on those marked lines.

The ribbons are woven in the corner. I pinned everything in place and then topstitched using a smoke monofilament thread with regular thread in the bobbin.

The nice thing about this denim is that it's heavy enough that I don't need to make a quilt from these. I just had to turn under the edges and finish it off with my serger. If I didn't have a serger I'd zigzag around the raw edge and then turn the hem back and topstitch it in place.

A couple of hours of work and, boom!, they are done. I did 3 with red in the middle and 3 with blue in the middle. One note about the ribbon. It does shrink when washed so I pre-shrunk the ribbon before I cut it. I did that by cutting a long length, soaking it in hot water and then hanging it to air dry.
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​I'm ready for next summer's patriotic holidays!