Today Paulette is sewing one of our very popular patterns, the Framed Floral Placemats, and you can sew along with her. It’s our pattern #631. Grab your copy, and some pretty floral fabrics, or whatever fabrics you want, and join in!
Video transcript:
Hi everyone I’m Paulette Morrissey from Tulip Square, and this week’s video is going to be a tutorial that goes along with one of our patterns. This is for pattern number 631 called Framed Florals. It’s a placemat pattern and this is what it looks like. Very pretty pattern. This is one designed by my daughter Tes, and we also made it in kind of a black and orange print just to see how that would look. We like to make some varieties, just to see the difference. And here’s another one kind of got some little pears for the kitchen. Some upside-down pears, there we go. So this is a, this is a tutorial that kind of goes with this pattern, so I’m not going to give you the sizes and dimensions and everything of all the pattern pieces because that’s all in the pattern and you would need the pattern to actually make the whole thing. Not just make it from watching the video. So like I said this is for that pattern and also at the end of the pattern there’s a useful little tip she also added to go with the flying geese, which is the main pattern piece in this pattern. So we’re going to go head over to the sewing machine, I’m going to pick up some different fabric so you can see it in a fourth color option, and, let’s get busy.
Alright so to make this pattern you need three different colors of fabric. A dark print, a small print, and an accent print. I’m using this blue flower for the dark print, I’m using this green kind of crosshatch thing for the small print, and I’m using this for my bold print and I did fussy cut the main piece just because I thought it would be kind of cute. So to start with, you’re going to take the small print rectangles, and remember I’m not giving you all the sizes for all these pieces because that’s all in the pattern and this is basically a tutorial to go with the pattern. I’m going to take one of the squares of the dark print and I’m going to make, basically I’m going to make flying geese, and if you don’t know what flying geese are I’m going to show you. If you do know what flying geese are, you can ignore me for the next few minutes. laughs Okay so first of all when you’re making flying geese or a lot of other pieces that require a diagonal stitching line, like here, it’s recommended that you take a ruler and you draw a line down the center here so you can follow that to sew on. Well I don’t like drawing all those lines. So what I’ve come up with is if you look on my sewing machine right here I’ve got this black thin vinyl tape stuck here and when my needle is in its center position, this edge of the black line lines up with the needle. So I can put my piece right here. So if the corner, this corner right here, lines up with the needle and this corner lines up with this end. You see that right there. Lines up with this end of this edge on this edge here. I keep that in line and I stitch. It would be as if I was sewing following a straight line that I drew. I’ll show you what I mean. I’m just going to keep this point, not going to let it waver back and forth like this it’s got to stay right on this this line.
And that’s all you have to look at when you’re sewing. You don’t have to look where your needle is or anything and you can see that it made a perfect seam from point-to-point and it eliminates a lot of line drawing which I don’t like doing for a lot of pieces. So for a flying geese what you do is you you sew a diagonal on this line, and then you cut this off and you leave a nice quarter inch seam. Doesn’t have to be exact because, it doesn’t, like so. Then you’re going to press this open like so, then you take the second one of these squares, and put it in the opposite corner and you stitch along this way. Okay this end of this triangle, this square, is overlapping this triangle, and that’s correct because once you sew this down you’re going to overlap like that, they’re going to be like on top of each other here, and that will be hidden when you have your seam allowance of a quarter inch so that’s perfect. So what I’m going to do is stitch from here, on my sewing machine following the black line I showed you, or the line you drew, whichever you prefer. Also I want to point out that when you’re sewing things like this, where you’re sewing from a point, it seems for me to work better if I’m sewing from this end that’s on a whole edge, as opposed to starting it here where you’re starting where two corners come together because this my machine likes to kind of just eat that and chunk it all down inside the machine. But if I start from this side where there’s an actual line of fabric I don’t have that problem. So just a little thing you might want to try if you’re having trouble with your machine trying to eat your fabric. We have this. Pretty simple. Now I’m pressing towards the, towards the corners and you can see that they overlap right here and that will be when you sew this piece together that quarter inch will be hidden in a seam and you’ll have your next piece come to a perfect little point right here so what I’m going to do is make three more of these.
Alright now I’m going to do the same thing, but using the dark print as the background and the bold print on the corners. I’m going to do these this way.
Same exact process, just different colors. Also make sure whenever you’re sewing anything on the diagonal like this, that you’re careful not to stretch the fabric, because you’re on the diagonal it will have a tendency to stretch it if you’re not careful. So just let the sewing machine kind of guide it along and don’t be pulling on it.
Now I’m going to take the opposite, I’m going to take the bold rectangles and sew the dark, now these I’m only going to sew to the left side okay. I’m going to take two of them, and sew them just to the left side. The remaining two pieces like this and remaining two of these, and sew them to the opposite side. At the end of the pattern Tes has a neat little trick of what to do with all these little triangles before you actually cut them off, so check that out on the end of the pattern. Okay now we’ve got all our pieces done and these pieces are all for one placement. You will make four times these pieces if you’re making the whole set of four, but I’m only showing you one in the video. So you’ve got two lefts, two rights, two with the dark triangle, and four which were our first ones with the dark corners on the edges. So we’re going to start sewing by taking one of these first pieces we made. We’re going to turn them around, and going to take one of these and one of the pieces that have the left dark corner, and we’re going to sew those together, end to end, matching up the two dark fabrics, and just sew them together with a nice even precise quarter inch seam.
Okay now I’ve got two of these pieces made, and the next thing I’m going to do is sew the accent piece with the triangle on the right side to the opposite end on both of these, also just using a plain old quarter inch seam. So they’re going to look like this and just sew right down there we can do that on both of these pieces next. Okay so now you’ve got that done so we’re going to set these aside for just a few minutes, and we’re going to take our bold accent piece and we’re going to sew these little short strips across two sides. And then we’re going to take the two longer strips, and we’re going to sew them on the two sides here. Got a nice little framed box. Make sure you’re using nice even quarter inch seams so everything lines up nicely.
Okay next we’re going to take two of these with a green triangle on them and we’re going to sew them on opposite sides of the block.
Okay I’ve got that all ironed nice and neat and everything’s nice and flat, so now we’re going to take these two triangle pieces with the dark triangle middle and sew them to the opposite ends, so we’ve got these big dark arrowy things pointing away from the center. and you’re going to sew the long solid line towards the center of each piece. Just like so. All towards the center, and don’t put it like this, because that won’t work. So just sew these two down, both ends. Quarter inch seams. okay now we’re going to take these big long pieces and just attach one at the top and one at the bottom of your placement and then the whole placemat is put together. So all you’ve got to do is make sure you line up your seams, and make sure that the little intersections connect nicely and nestle together so you get everything lined up and all of your pieces look right once its sewn.
Framed Floral placemat pattern. This means it’s ready for quilting and binding and everything and it’s all done. And I wanted to mention that sometimes when I’m, when I’m testing a pattern or making alterations to a pattern just trying things out, and I only make one placement instead of a whole set, one placement by itself is very handy thing. You can either use it for a big mat on the end of an end table or a nightstand or something to be a giant coaster so when you set your beverages down, you don’t have to worry about about putting it on a coaster. You can also use it in the middle of a table in the kitchen or small table somewhere just for a little accent piece, it could also be a nice pillow. So don’t think whenever you make placemats you have to make four of them. You can make just one. So that is the end of that and I’m going to show you a couple of different variations we made on it. Here’s that same pattern using just different shades of blues, here’s one that little cute pear print using two light prints, only one accent pattern, and this one kind of looks almost Halloweeny doesn’t it it? Just kind of a cute black and orange print. So you can see how different it looks depending on the fabric you use, of course just like any quilting. There you go. I hope this video helps you if you bought this pattern or if you are thinking of buying this pattern, here’s the video for it.
So now you all know how to make the framed floral placemats. Kind of a fun pattern. It goes pretty quick, when I did this actual one in real time and didn’t it took about an hour to make one placemat, so if you’re making four of them you’ll be able to chain the pieces so it will go a little bit faster. So if you like this video please hit the Like button, subscribe if you can, and hit a little bell if you’d like to be notified when we’re going to add new videos. But we are going to add a new video every Saturday and next week it’ll be some kind of a tutorial that I haven’t figured out yet. Check back and see. And one other thing I wanted to mention. I recently made some little pincushion people. Here’s one of them, these are little pin cushion dolls, and I actually made them as gifts for some family members and here’s another one, trying to grab her without choking her, there’s another one. I’m considering making a little video series on these. It would take a little longer than what I would put in one video, but I might make it into a three or four video series. So if you’re interested in me making a video of that let me know. It would be a free video and I give you (a list of) all the supplies you need and everything, so if you’re interested in me making a video on that kind of thing let me know and I will get started on that pretty quick. So everybody have a good day, have some fun sewing, and I’ll see you next time. Bye bye.