For my sister Jackie’s birthday this year I made her a table runner, eight placemats, and eight napkins using charm packs and yardage from Brigitte Heitland’s Zen Chic Reel Time fabric collection and adaptations of two of her patterns designed for this collection. I made the Tea Time table runner a little smaller than specified on the pattern, so it could fit if Jackie only used six of the placemats plus the table runner. Below is a photo my sister took after receiving her birthday present.

The placemats for my sister are a modification of Brigitte’s Little Break placemat pattern. Each placemat has a different configuration of 2 1/2″ squares cut from 5″ charm squares. I then sewed a thin inner border of solid grey fabric and the same outer border of Reel Time Metro Dots Black on each placemat. The backing for each placemat is Lenses in Slate.

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to bind these placemats. I thought about using the cheater binding I use for mug rugs (using the backing as the binding), but I decided I wanted to the back and the binding to be different, so I read a lot of online tutorials and emailed Yvonne@Quilting Jetgirl several times asking her questions about binding placemats since she’s made so many cool ones. Search for placemats on her blog, and you will be amazed at all the different ones she has created. I was going to cut my binding strips the usual way selvage-to-selvage and use one and a half binding strips for each 11″ x 17″ placemat using single-fold binding to reduce the fabric bulk. Then I decided to use my AccuQuilt machine to cut 67″ long strips using the lengthwise grain for 1.5″ wide strips of binding which meant that I only needed to have one binding join for each placemat. I had planned to use a decorative stitch to sew the binding down on the front of the placemats and table runner, but I didn’t like how it looked, so I ended up hand-stitching the binding down.

There are many mitered corner napkin tutorials available online. For the napkins I made for Jackie with Reel Time The End fabric, I used a tutorial from  Splendorfallsmc.blogspot.com that I saw on Pinterest, but when I tried to go into the original post on Bloglovin’, I discovered that this post had been removed. I’d like to make some more napkins sometime but may try a different method next time. If you know of a good mitered corner napkin tutorial, please share.

This is my first finish of my 2017 Finish-A-Long Quarter 1 Goals.

Linking up to Cooking Up Quilts: Main Crush Monday.