Placemats!

So as part of cleaning up my stash of fabrics I had, I've been trying to use fabric in small quick projects. A while back I found some chicken fabric at Hancocks and because my mom has a somewhat chicken theme in her kitchen I made her some placemats and napkins.

I still had a good amount of fabric left over though and I can't imagine what I would do with chicken fabric so I decided to make some more placemats and potholders/ hot pads. The placemats I made before were just basic squares with some rick rack on them and this time I wanted something a little sturdier so I quilted them and bound them with bias binding made from the chicken fabric.

The hotpad was just a small quilted square and I made this first so didn't think to bind it with it's same fabric and also just wanted to use up some binding I had. I keep telling myself that somehow the blue goes with the red...

It's probably really not the best hot pad since I didn't use any thermal batting or anything like that that most tutorials call for in their hotpads and other kitchen things. I just used some batting I bought for a quilt I made that I don't like and am trying to use up. So we'll see how it goes, they may catch on fire and go up in flames but hopefully they will work well enough to use just to set hot things on.

Of course, then I found the leftover red binding.  I wanted to use it up so I grabbed another scrap of fabric and made two more for my own stash of things for my house I'm moving into this July!

Summer Sewing

I've been working on cleaning up all my sewing stuff so far this summer, trying to use up fabrics I have and finish projects that have been piling up. I haven't done much historical sewing unfortunately just lots of quick and easy projects. I've made quite a few home items like placemats and found a great simple summer top pattern. I'm getting caught up pictures of everything so I'll get all my other projects posted this week.

For mother's day I embroidered a "Mothers Tree" which was basically just my mother's mother and her grandmothers and their grandmothers etc., as far back as I could. So I guess it's kind of confusing if someone else looked at it since it includes both grandmothers, since that means mother-in-laws are on it.
Originally I was going to just frame it but decided to make it into a little pillow filled with lavender. I really like how it came out though, I used a scrap of silk I had and the lavender was perfect for it!