I’m Ready for August’s Friday Night Sew In

On my Unfinished Projects list I have listed two table runners/toppers with a notation saying they needed to have borders added and then be basted, quilted and bound.  The blocks in these two items were made back when AmandaJean over at crazy mom quilts was hosting her first quilt-a-long.   Not only was it AmandaJean’s first quilt-a-long, it was my first ever attempt to piece those more intricate kind of blocks.  I hadn’t yet learned that a ¼” seam isn’t really a ¼” seam but an almost ¼’ seam so very few of my blocks came out the right size or even the same size.

At the time, rather than try to sew all those variously sized blocks into a quilt, I sewed them into two table runners and a table topper.  One of the table runners did get completed but the other two have been sitting in a drawer for well over 3 years now because I wasn’t satisfied with the way they looked but couldn’t really figure out why.

Then earlier this week, I had them out and was looking at them again and I had an ah-ha moment when I realized what it was that wasn’t quite right about them.  I had used the same fabric for the sashing as I had for the background of the blocks so that the blocks themselves lost some of their definition.

The effect of having the sashing and background the same isn’t as bad in the table topper with three fabrics (the yellow, green and background) but on the table runner where I’d used blocks with only two fabrics it was more noticeable.   It’s not that they looked terrible.   The blocks just weren’t being shown off to their best advantage.

I decided to unsew both the table topper and table runner.  I’m going to sew the table topper back together with different fabric for the sashing and also add borders.  I’m thinking about using that fabric you see draped over the chair in the photo above.  It’s hard to tell from the picture but the green fabric is actually green with gold swirls.

Or would another fabric choice perhaps work better?  What do you think?

Instead of remaking the table runner as well, I turning the blocks from it into hot pads to use on our dining room table.  Up until now, we’ve been using placemats folded in half when we needed to put something hot on the table.  These will look much prettier.

Here they are sandwiched, basted and ready to work on during tonight’s FNSI.

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