Thanksgiving Table Pad

My best friend and I have coffee together most Tuesdays, one of which happened to be the day I received my Connecting Threads order. She indulged my desire to look at all of the pretty new fabric, including some batiks with a swirl motif, commenting on how nice the orange-gold and turquoise looked together.

I had quite enjoyed making the Christmas table pad, and that type of project seemed like a great option for these fabrics. The pattern is made entirely of half-square triangles arranged to create concentric squares. 32 back to back squares to make 64 half-square triangles. Here are the HST's all stacked up and ready to go:

The back and the binding are an orange-on-orange fabric, also from Connecting Threads. The quilting is about 1/8 inch in the smaller gold squares.

My lack of a walking foot for my sewing machine didn't seem to be much of an obstacle this time.

The finished product is approximately 16" by 16". My hope to have it ready for Thanksgiving Sunday dinner and Michelle and Adam's place didn't quite come together, but better late than never!

Indecision

After another coaster making excursion, I decided that I wanted to tackle a larger project than I have undertaken so far. Part of my hesitancy to take on something bigger is that I don't have all of the proper attachments for my sewing machine. It turns out that finding a walking foot for my older model Singer isn't as easy as I would have hoped. That I wanted something more ambitious is about the only thing I could settle one.

And thus begun the cycle of search online—find something interesting—pull out various fabrics, none of which seem right—second guess project selection—repeat. It felt like this went on for a very long time. Finally, I settled on a holiday table pad for our coffee table.



Most of the block are made from two long strips of gold and red, cut to the appropriate size.

Once I finished the top, I used some plain red for the binding and the backing.

The finished product was about 18" x 27".

The good news is that my sewing does have a feed dog cover!