Saturday 23 July 2011

Mitered corner practise

A quick and easy table topper can be made with a FQ and a metre of border fabric. It's a great way to practise making perfect mitered corners :-). I recently finished a table topper and a bonus mini topper and 2 coasters out of a lovely striped border fabric. The added bonus is that you can cut the FQ down to size to make it fit whatever border fabric you have :-)

Once the corners were mitered, and the excess triangles cut off, I happened to see my 60 degree ruler on the table and got the brainstorm to cut triangles to make a little hexagon shaped piece. As an added bonus, the little mat fits perfectly into the center of the square table topper for a different look. There was a narrow strip of border fabric left, which produced two little coasters also cut with the 60 degree ruler:

This is also a great project to practise some different free motion quilt patterns. I quilted the center with flower motifs:

I tried out some spirals on the center of the mini topper inspired by a new quilt book I picked up recently: "Machine Quilting Solutions" by Christine Maraccini.

Here is the back which showed the spirals better on a photo:

The spirals are easy to echo in a narrow border:

Quilting on the coaster:

I gave this set as a wedding gift with an ice cream scoop and waffle cone holders. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of those as they were purchased between the ceremony and reception :-). The colours matched really nicely!



3 comments:

The Cozy Quilter said...

What a lovely wedding gift! I hope they invite you over for ice cream sundaes soon!

Ellen said...

Very pretty! Your quilting looks fantastic.

Cheryl's Teapots2Quilting said...

I have lots of scrap pieces from my mitered borders. I'd never thought about using them to make these. I do have the ruler. Thanks. Also, love the Elna in the next post. I've never seen one in the wild. I'll have to start looking for one. Not a lot of machines in the wild in my area.