valentine coaster

Continuing with the them of trying to teach myself how to quilt, use up the stash and make useful things for the home I decided to make a little coaster. Mr D always uses an old card to put his mug on so I thought a coaster for him would be a perfect start as he actual NEEDS one! Great to make something that is actually needed, it's so nice when a hobby becomes useful :)

I started with some rectangles... a lot of my sewing seems to be based on rectangles just lately for some odd reason. I sewed them together to make 2 squares.

At this point I couldn't find any batting/wadding so in the interests of being green I decided to use up some scraps from the last project...of course as things go I did find some wadding after I'd done this lol...but the 'scrap wadding' acted as a stabiliser anyway so that was good  :)

Then I thought seeing as it was for Mr D and the fabric was mostly red ( which makes me think of romance ) it needed a heart of some sort. Off to the kitchen to find a heart shaped cookie cutter as a template to draw around ;-) Here you can see I hadn't found the wadding yet but I did put a layer of real wadding under the red when I started to sew.

Then I sewed around it, left the actual heart plain to make it stand out...well it already had that pink print on it...and played around with quilting the outside...and "Hey Presto!" it worked!

Here is a pic of the back...You can see it was a sandwich! ...the scraps worked well as a stabiliser...I guessed it doesn't really matter what goes inside as long as you can wash it okay :)

A later view of the back... I attached the second 'red square' I'd made as a back to cover up the hideous mess lol...this is before the binding was added....but after it had been squared up etc...so this and the next pic are possibly out of sequence but I'm sure you can suss out the order I sewed in.

I squared it up with the rotary cutter and quilting ruler...it does look squarer ( is that a word? lol ) than the photo would have you believe :-)

I don't have a pic of it with the binding on but I did bind it with a thin white bias binding which was all I had in my impatience but worked well...Perhaps I'll remember to take a pic of the finished article soon...but you get the gist of it...I think it's cute, certainly doesn't look like it was made from scraps and could make a perfect Valentine's gift. Ah yes and just in case you are interested, the red fabric was from an old 'Next' brand ( I think )  ladies' top ( I bought it from a charity shop with the idea of altering it but never did...well I have now, but not into another top lol ) the pattern was from the outer top and the red was  the lining ...hence the perfect match, yay! :)