Project 98 - Chocolate Table Mats

Another new project!!!!    However, this one doesn’t count either since I merely helped my mother with it and didn’t do it all myself.  (Did you know that if someone else buys the fabric, the project doesn’t count as a real UFO - unfinished project?  It’s an SEP - someone else’s project!).  

My niece saw some table mats that mom and I had made for her mother and decided she wanted a set.  We asked her what color and she said it “didn’t matter.”  Obviously she is an alien inhabiting the body of my niece.  No one related to me EVER says that color “doesn’t matter.”  

My mom has always done very traditional quilting but we wanted this project to go quickly so we could get back to real UFO’s.  So  I taught her to do this using a quilt-as-you-go method.  I cut the strips and the backing and placed the center strip on the wadding and backing for her.  She added the strips and I finished it all with a French fold binding.  (It’s so much fun working on projects with my mom.  I feel like that by helping her  I’m paying her back for all the fingerpaint, glitter, glue, threads, etc that she let me trail through the house when I was little.)

Now if you look closely (don’t!), you will see that somehow mom didn’t keep the additional strips precisely “squared.”  However, we decided that since they were table mats and were probably going to be covered by round plates, who was going to notice?  In addition, my niece has a 3 year old and a 6 month old so they were going to be covered with food before it was over anyway!!

If you hang out very much around this blog, you will find that I don’t do work “for show.”  I come from a rural farming family and both of my parents were used to making every scrap count for something useful.  So, crooked stripes on a table mat are perfectly fine if the table mats are useful.

Now, I do promise I am going to work on some projects  already in process next.  The weather has cooled down, so I’m mounting  a ladybug quilt  (project 91) on the frame in the cabin and getting started on  quilting it this weekend.