Just One More

Halloween placemat. I finished the four placemats from my last post but I had an idea for another one that I wanted to make while the idea was fresh and all the Halloween fabric was out. This one focuses on the spider themed fabric and has a nice little spider right in the middle. 

After I finish this placemat all the 'spooky' fabric goes on the shelf of "holiday" fabric for another year. Maybe I'll make something else next year, maybe not. I never did use the Bat theme fabric. I had an idea for a pieced Bat made with the grunge black fabric surrounded by the bat prints, or better yet, an applique bat on a pieced background. But now it's time to think about Christmas projects.  I'll write a note to myself about the Bat placemat idea with a sketch and put it away with the fabric. Next time I get that fabric out I'll have jump start idea to work with. 

Patchwork Halloween Placemats

In the last two days I have managed to get four Halloween themed placemats pieced. I have ideas for a couple more and plenty of extra Halloween theme fabric to work with, but first I am going to machine quilt these and bind them. 

The first one I did was with the scary cat fabric. I looked up several cat patchwork patterns and ended up designing my own very simple cat face tessellation pattern using just two sizes of blocks, one 4 1/2"  square and two 2" squares for each cat face. 

Then I went with a simple checkerboard pattern for the black and white skulls fabric and some other assorted light and dark fabric. 

Finally I worked up the idea I had for a tombstones patchwork using some assorted grey and dark brown fabric I had on hand. Using a strip piecing method I sewed a tombstone dark light strip and cut it into random widths, added dark strips of fabric in between random height light tombstone blocks, and stacked them up in rows. 

I also planned to do a spiderweb like pieced block but I'm going to finish these four placemats first.

Halloween Deadline

Talk about last minute projects. There's nothing like a looming deadline to motivate action. We'll see how much I actually get done in two days. I'm not trying to do too much, just a couple placemats. And I don't usually get into Halloween that much but I found some really cute grungy Halloween fabric (Eerie by BasicGrey) and had to have it (on sale of course), and the scraggly cat Sebastion from the Ghastlies fabric line was also a 'must have'. 

And I found some neat spooky cemetery fabric at JoAnn's fabric store (also on sale, there is a benefit to waiting until the last minute). I plan on using a solid piece of that for one side of a  reversible placemat and patchwork a tombstone design for the other side. I'll post the results, hopefully in two days!

With all this fabric I'll get ideas as I go along. Each placemat will be different, spiderwebs, skulls, cats, cemeteries, bats. Lots of creepy spooky stuff. Mwahahaha...