a variation

it’s your mum’s job to love all the little things you make. mine has unfailingly encouraged my creativity, and has aided and abetted me in any way i’ve asked, from letting me hammer old nails into bits of wood as i imagined engineering some personal robot companion, to lending me bowls from the kitchen in which to concoct brews from berries, leaves, pollen, and mud from the garden, to good old fashioned cutting, pasting and drawing.

i’m left-handed, so she’s always found the way i go about things a bit puzzling (“but that’s backwards”), and teaching me to knit proved to be quite a challenge, but i know she’s proud of what i make because her house is full of framed embroideries and drawings i’ve done for her, and she has a box of childhood creations that she’s put somewhere safe in case of fire.

even though i know all this, i was still very proud when she asked me to make some christmas presents for her friends this year. she ordered some coasters.

here’s the first set:

i’m following the same steps that i outlined in the ‘coasters in an hour’, pattern that i wrote and posted a while ago, with a couple of tiny variations:

instead of cutting the same size squares of fabric A and fabric B, one is designated as backing (let’s say that’s fabric A), and then two fabrics are chosen as the top (they’ll, perhaps predictably, be B & C). 

as you can see above, i’ve chosen a kind of ‘feature fabric’ as fabric B, and a few different complimentary fabrics, which for the purposes of simplification i will refer to collectively as fabric C.

i wanted to make these ones a teensy shade bigger than the original pattern, so i cut four squares of fabric A at 4″ instead of 3.75″. then i cut four rectangles of fabric B at 4×3″, and four from fabric(s) C at 4×1.5″.

i paired each piece of fabric B with a piece of fabric C, and sewed them into squares along the 4” edge, using, as always, a ¼” seam.

the rest of the process was the same as in the original pattern.

i like the way this variation not only lets you use a bigger range fabrics, but also lets you use some fabric that you may only have tiny pieces of left. i tend to cling to skerricks of fabrics that i have loved (as many quilters do!), and i’m always thrilled to be able to use them up on things that i know will be used and hopefully loved.