Sweet Simple Snack Mats

I spent my Sunday morning at the sewing machine working on some patchwork snack mats (or what some of you may call "mug rugs")...I wanted to use some cute scraps of Valentine fabric (Candy Kisses by Sandy Gervais for Moda) I had in my vast collection of fabric bits and pieces. Some of the pieces were rather small, so I decided to cut 2" squares - this was a quick task using my AccuQuilt GO! fabric cutter. After cutting 75 squares, I started laying them out in sets of 5 x 5 (25 squares to a mat). I then used a fun way to piece them together - I fused the 25 squares to a 10" x 10" piece of fusible lightweight interfacing - then pieced them together from the wrong side - it works really slick for small pieces of fabric. I decided to attach jumbo rick rack around the perimeter of each before adding the batting and backing. Once they were turned and pressed, I top stitched around the entire perimeter -the finished size is 7.5" x 7.5". I was very pleased with the results...and very happy to spend my quiet morning being creative in my studio! These cute little quilted mats are all the rage right now...perfect for sprucing up an afternoon snack...and there are so many fun variations - I have been wanting to make some for a while and chances are I will be making more with different fabric scraps....

The rest of my afternoon and evening will be spent working on those Halloween designs I mentioned to you yesterday - I have a lot of stitching and designing to do!

...and one more note - I recently hosted a Valentine giveaway on my Facebook fan page and it was so much fun, I decided I would have another chance to win here on my blog....details will be posted in the next couple days. If you like my Valentine charts, this is a giveaway you won't want to miss...