Wednesday Sewing - Thread Sketched Placemats

The past few months have been so busy I haven't been able to really take on any big projects or work on my thread sketching.  Things have settled enough that I was able to finally start on a denim crazy quilt and this week I took a break from that to do some thread sketching.  I've had these Ikea placemats for some time now - they were a great price and looked like empty canvases!  I finally decided to put scrap flowers on them and thread sketch in the petals and centers.  If you haven't thread sketched before, it's not as hard as I thought it would be.  See this past post on free motion quilting and this one on thread sketching.  I've been thread sketching with thicker (size 30) thread, but for this project I just used regular sewing thread.  The placemats are thick enough it seemed to work well.

Materials:
*plain placemats
*scraps of fabric
*Steam-A-Seam (I used 2 because I had it, but a thinner bond would work fine)
*heavy duty needle - I used the denim needle already in my machine from the denim crazy quilt squares
*black sewing thread
*flower patterns

1. Using the patterns, trace two big flowers and one little flower for each placemat onto one side of the Steam-A-Seam sheet.  Cut flowers out roughly - don't cut on the lines yet.

2.  Peel off the Steam-A-Seam paper that does not have the flowers drawn on it and iron the flower pieces (still not cut out on the lines) onto the wrong side of your fabric.  Cut fabric out along the lines on the Steam-A-Seam.

3.  Peel off the other paper side and arrange flowers on the placemat. 

4.  Thread sketch petals and accent lines onto each flower.  Make several sewing passes, trying not to get exactly on the line from the previous pass.

5.  Iron scrap pieces of Steam-A-Seam onto the backsides of small pieces of your fabric.  Free hand cut out shapes for the centers of the flowers and iron into place.

6.  I thread sketched spirals into the centers, again making several passes.

I like how these turned out so much, I'm going back to Ikea for more placemats to put other designs on.  I think I'll even try dying some first!

Happy Creating!  Deborah