Life has quite suddenly become more difficult and complicated than most of my generation have had to face in their lifetime. It is a global and whole of nation catastrophe and crisis, affecting our health ad livelihoods. It seems an irony that what I’ve been making during these times of Covid-19, when gatherings of no more than 5 at a time have only recently been allowed, I have been making dinner table mats!
I have an urge to use what is available – since we haven’t been able to indulge our consumerism at ‘non-essential’ businesses. But not just that, I have plenty on hand, and after a good tidy up and chucking out (- in the direction of wonderful people who make cloth sanitary kits for girls in under-developed countries).
These mats are pretty straight forward – or so I thought! Cutting 16x11” rectangles from an ‘overlooked’ piece of cotton with an Indian design, I fused each with some quite stiff vyelene I had in my stash (not sure why). The fabric must have been a cotton sarong of some kind, but contained splotches of bad printing in one area, easy to cut around.
Aiming to avoid hand-sewing of edges, and in order to make the binding stronger for washing I cut the backing 1and1/4” wider all round, in order to turn it to the front and give the idea of a bound edge by machine sewing. That worked well. But when it came to doing a mitred corner – one I prefer over the straight edge finish at each corner, I was stumped. I can do a mitre turn with ease when attaching the border to a quilt…very professionally! These are much less so, and my maths was not up to working it out. Anyway, here they are, looking quite bright and cheery for the table. And now I’ve figured out a way to do my next lot –but I findß it’s all in the doing!
Next project: to be finished is my “Gang gang” wall hanging, which started with the gift of a tea towel.
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