I decided to make a mug rug using my Accuquilt holiday-related dies as a gift for a colleague. I made one over the weekend but messed up the quilting on it: wrong choice of quilt design, wrong choice of thread, couldn’t just undo it and start over because the fabric showed too many holes. But it was a good re-entry into this type of project as it’s been awhile since I’ve done a small, bound project.
This one worked! I was still making decisions as I went along rather than planning too much ahead but I had a great time doing it!
I used the gnome die, added a little puffball to the top of the gnome hat (using the “nose” part of the die and doing my best to fussy cut it with the white-on-white print), added the little black buttons from the second die.
The holly leaves and berries are on the holiday die. I was able to use the red berry die to make the black buttons on the gnome’s clothes.
As I was making it, I was debating how to quilt it, but then I got the idea to use some fusible matte vinyl I’d recently picked up for making some zipper bags. Since this is going to be a mug rug, I decided not to quilt it and just fuse the vinyl instead to make it easier to clean.
Rather than doing a binding, I cut the backing fabric an inch bigger all around (8” square front and batting, 10” square backing). Then I folded it in half and in half again to create the binding. Decorative stitch to hold it down and voila, Christmas gift done!
My favorite things about this project:
Using some of my accuquilt dies that I’ve had for awhile but hadn’t played with yet.
Using a bunch of my hand-dyed fabric scraps that I’d fused for projects years ago—made it super-fast to do this project.
Using a batting scrap.
Getting it done in about an hour!
And now that I’ve used that vinyl for the first time, I want to use it on ALL the things!