Happy Birthday, Violet!

My most recent creative thrill here on Blueberry Rd has been making placemats for Violet. Making aprons, you see, generates scraps. Lots and lots of scraps if you make lots and lots of aprons. And, if aprons give you scraps, scraps give you placemats.
Violet admires my scrappy placemats on every visit, so making a set for her was an easy gift choice. And, since she prefers a vegetarian/raw foods diet, pulling out all the fruit and veggie prints gave me a good starting point for fabric selections.

Cutting out individual aprons really generates little fabric waste. It's only the mass production that produces the bags of odds and ends that allow me to make these little placemat sized quilts. Trimming the scraps down to 2 1/2 x 4 1/2 rectangles requires some careful cutting. And, of course, to keep the patchwork interesting, so in addition to the "theme" fabrics, I like to throw in a few surprises, like the Dagwood fabric that adds just a bit of quirkiness and the lone piece of cowboy fabric to honor Violet's Oklahoma roots. (No, she's not a cowgirl, but Oklahoma will always be a musical to me.) After cutting up my selection of fabrics, I loosely sorted the rectangles into two piles: one light and one dark. From there, it was a matter of sewing the pieces together in pairs and pairs again and then in rows to create a brick pattern.
Violet enjoys nuts as a sound source of protein and, as luck would have it, I just happened to have a nut-printed fabric for the back of the mats. Obviously, the goddess of quilting - I call her Fabriana - is my friend.
The patchwork was paired with the nutty back and bamboo batting and meandered with a yellow varigated thread. Bamboo batting, if you haven't tried it, is amazingly soft and easy to work with. I bought a small batt to try on a wallhanging a while back and knew the leftovers would be the perfect choice for these scrappy whole foods-themed little mats. Violet will have to let me know how it holds up to repeated washing, but for the hand and ease of use, it definitely rates five stars in my book.
The placemats turned out pretty darned cute, in my estimation. I'll admit, I was a bit surprised by the amount of yellow fabrics once they were all pieced. The whole time I was working on them, they struck me as orange. But that is part of the thrill of true scrap work ... each piece is a little bit of a surprise. And tomorrow, when we travel to Mankato to wish Violet a happy birthday, I hope her little birthday surprise gives her as much pleasure as the process of making them gave me.
Happy Birthday, dear Violet. And many, many more.