Selvage Placemats

 

We were in need of some placemats and I decided to take some time last week to make some.

I didn't want to do anything pieced, I wanted to keep it fairly sensitive. And I thought I'd try to use up my selvages. I had been collecting them for a while and I have seen some amazing projects (especially at the Selvage Blog). I Googled for inspiration and found some great ideas. I settled on this layout.

One of the greatest things about this project - minimal pressing! I keep my selvages in an oversized plastic tub that had cheese puffs in it. So, they were scrunchy and had to be pressed, but otherwise, it was just sew, sew, sew!

I separated them out by color, as much as possible. I looked at both the printing on the selvage and whatever remained of the actual pattern, for the color. I ended up with enough for four placemats. I did three color family ones (blue/aqua, pink/red/neutral, and citrusy colors) and one random leftovers.

 

  

Most placemat patterns seem to be 13"x17." I decided to go bigger and these ended up at about 14"x19," but it would have been better if I had made them a couple inches smaller. There's a reason most patterns called for 13"x17"!

I sewed the first one "wrong" in the sense that I was making more work for myself. So you can see that the pink/red and the random one are a similar layout and the blue and the citrus one are similar. The red/pink one was the first one that I did and for some reason I tucked each strip underneath the previous. I'll blame it on my left-handed brain. Sometimes I just do things backwards. And, for the center strip, I had enough of the print to put right sides together and fold the strip back down towards the batting. So for the bottom two, I worked from the center out and for the top two I worked from the corner in.

Even with the size issue, I am super happy about how they turned out. And who knows, maybe they will shrink a little in the wash.

So, I was able to purge some fabric and I was able to use up some materials I already had and that is a win-win-win situation!