Very Blue

Here's my latest creation. It was a pain getting here but they're finally done. I had a good sized piece of this fabric so wanted to make both a center piece and place mats. I have so many bits of fabric in my sewing room and I started to wonder what I was keeping it for. So I've decided to use it where needed for my charity stuff. Why not. Aside from applique BOM's I won't use it. If I want something completely applique I usually buy a lot of new fabrics that go together. Anyway, here they are

Centre piece - can't call it a runner cause it's square.

And one of four matching place mats:

Not great photos. I think they look better in person but the bindings are questionable. I didn't have enough of the snowman fabric so I added some of my own blue with tiny gold stars. I thought it would be fun to have a center mat to put things on. That's what I have on my table when the leaves are out and it's quite small and round. 

I picture this as something kids would like but maybe adults who like snowmen would like it too.

The problem with the binding is that the only fabric I had to make it with was polyester. It doesn't lay nice and flat like cotton. So the binding is not as nice as I would like it to be but on first glance it looks okay.  I did manage to do the binding on the center square on my machine. But then I spent a whole day sewing, ripping out, sewing, ripping out, adjusting tension, rethreading. winding a new bobbin, putting in a new needle. Nothing was working and I was constantly ending up with nests of thread on the bobbin side. So I gave up and have attached the binding to the front and am hand stitching as usual. 

At the very least they're done.