The Playful Placemats was the first pattern released by Cedar Quilt Co. (owned by Helen of Helen's Closet). It's available for free when you sign up to their newsletter, and it's specifically intended to be suitable for quilting beginners.
I would definitely class myself as a beginner in terms of quilting - I've made a couple of small quilted projects over the years, but nothing very big or particularly complicated.
The placemats appealed to me because they seemed like they would be a manageable project, plus the finished results looked lovely and I fancied some new placemats to brighten up my mealtimes. I also have a small collection of fat quarters of quilting cotton that I've accumulated over the years that deserve to be put to good use!
The placemat tops are pieced from 24 half square triangles (HSTs), and the pattern gives you 24 different possible arrangements so you can choose the one that appeals most to you. I have to say, it took me a while to decide which ones to use because there are lots of nice options.
The pattern explains everything with a good level of detail, accompanied by great diagrams to provide added clarification. I really enjoyed gradually working through the steps, and piecing and quilting the placemats was a nice relaxing project.
I used the ¼" foot on my machine, which makes it much easier to sew the seams precisely when piecing - although I wouldn't want a quilting expert to examine the accuracy of some of my joins too closely! It was fun seeing my chosen patterns gradually emerge as I joined the HSTs together.
I don't have a walking foot for my machine so I just did the quilting using a normal foot and that worked out fine. As the placemats are fairly small, they were no trouble to quilt. I don't know that I'd fancy trying to wrangle anything big through my regular machine to quilt, but this kind of project is absolutely fine - as long as you don't mind sewing lots of straight lines of course!
The fabrics that I used all came from my stash. The prints I used for the tops were from a fat quarter pack that I got in a goodie bag at a sewing meetup, the white background is some mystery cotton that I acquired somewhere along the line, and the binding and my backings (which I now realise I didn't photograph!) are some chambray that I bought super cheap in a charity shop and have gradually used up in various projects. I also had some batting left over from another project a few years ago. So between all that and the free pattern, this was a very economical project and only cost my time!
If you're interested in giving quilting a try, I'd definitely recommend having a look at the Playful Placemats pattern. I really enjoyed working on the project over a couple of evenings, and I'm very happy with how my placemats turned out. I'm keen to try some other small-scale quilting projects now - I'm quite tempted to give the pillow size of Cedar Quilt Co.'s recently released Whale's Tail a go. I'll be sure to post it here if I do!
