Mug Rug Hugs

I am continuing to cannibalize The Secret Garden. This time I am using it to make mug rugs for some dear friends I will be seeing in January. The entire project was made using leftovers and scraps. I didn't even have to buy the thread.

Here is where I started:

Rocky Mountain Four-Patch Chain block from The Secret Garden.

I ripped out a few seams in this block to remove the four corner squares, which were the perfect size for mug rugs. I then sewed the four cross-pieces together in pairs to make two more squares, and I had the makings of 6 mug rugs.

This project turned out to be a big learning process for me (that's a good thing). I didn't have any directions to follow, so I had to wing it, using what I had learned from other projects. I did a lot of ripping out, but in the end, I let some imperfections go. It was hard to do, but I kept telling myself:

1. Nobody will notice
2. Nobody will care
3. I am being too much of a perfectionist
4. I have already spent way too much time on this
5. Why do they have to be perfect anyway?

I used my machine's monogramming capability. It doesn't look as nice as the results you get from a machine with a true embroidery feature, but I wanted a machine that is designed primarily for quilting. I only had to rip out half a monogram. I guess I learned something from my earlier attempts to make labels. It occurred to me, after the fact, that stabilizer might be a good way to go here.

For the actual quilting I tried some straight line quilting, parallel to the "ditch" lines, about 1/4" out. It looked terrible on the back (the side with the monogramming) because it crossed over the monogramming.

Next I tried a stippling or meandering pattern for the free-motion quilting. After doing three I decided I really didn't like the way it looked. In the end I went with a loopy pattern. I have not used this before, but I liked the way it looked. Instead of quilting it from the pieced side, I quilted from the monogrammed side, making sure not to quilt over the monogram.

Loopy quilting

The backing fabric is left over from from some yardage I bought to use in the piecing on the front. The coral backing fabric appears on the patchwork front of some of the pieces. A black companion fabric appears on the front of other pieces. I really like this fabric. The black was provided in the original BOM kits, and I was excited when I found the same 
print in coral.
 
For the binding, I was going to do it the easy way - attach to the back and machine-sew on the front, close to the edge. This looked terrible with white thread. I didn't want to try it with coral thread in the bobbin because I had been experiencing tension problems all through this project and I thought it would look really bad with two different colors if the tension was even the tiniest bit off. 

So, I just sewed the front of the binding down by hand. The white thread shows up too much for my taste, but at the end of a project I always have less patience for ripping out. If I had thought about it, I would have machine-sewn the binding onto the front and hand-sewn it on the back, perhaps using coral thread.

And here they are! I will be making a total of 8.

Lessons learned:

• Use a stabilizer when monogramming. (I did not.)
• Don't quilt through monogramming.
• Thread should match binding. 
• Take tiny stitches when hand-sewing the binding.
• Think carefully about whether to attach the binding to front or back, especially if you change your mind about method. 
• It's harder to do free-motion quilting on a tiny piece than on a fairly large piece.