Fabric Project for the Home

Snowy Evening Outing

by James Lee

Above: easy and elegant placemats with sparkled felt and sparkled rick-rack.  This fabric has metallic threads already in it, and is slightly higher in price. The napkin ring is made by brushing paper flowers with glitter glue and dabbing them in more prisma glitter. These were used for a special tea for a widow, and the others were used for a ladies Bible class luncheon.  Click on for a larger view.

It is a great time of year for a cheerful indoor project, such as easy felt placemats, that require no sewing. Wool felt or synthetic will both work well.

Turn your largest bowl upside down, or use a pizza pan of the size of your choice, and trace around it on the felt, with a ballpoint pen.  Cut out the circle, inside the line so that the pen marks will not show.

Here is what it looks like, plain. Some of the purposes of placemats are to protect your wood table from food and drink, or hot plates, provide a decorative background for your dishes, and to provide a soft, quiet landing for your forks, knives, spoons and cups. To make matching coasters for your goblets or glassware, just trace the smallest dessert bowl you have, or turn a goblet upside down and trace around the rim of the glass, for a pattern.

Just choose the color of felt that you feel best matches your dinner plates,

and add trims around the inside, if you prefer.  This one is a glittered rick-rack. Fabri-Tack works just fine, or use the sewing machine.

This one is made from glittered felt found at fabric stores around the country, and trimmed with wide rick-rack.  There are many interesting trims, and sometimes the sewing machine has a stitch that will decorate the edges.

These are easy to make and so pretty, you can have a quick gift for a wedding shower, or some other occasion.  If you are expecting company and want something special, just cut out some of these quick placemats to go with the occasion, whether it be spring or winter.  They wash nicely in the washing machine, but you may have to test one to see for sure if the fabric you are using will need to be hand washed or not.

Here is the smaller placemat, layered on top of the larger one.  There are a lot of colors available and you could experiment with the layering, to match the design colors in your plates.

One half yard of the 52 inch synthetic felt makes 5 large round placemats. The smaller round placemat will fit about 8 times on one half yard.  The fabric is about $5.00 a yard, so it will cost you $2.50 for 6 or 8 placemats, depending on the size you use. It is nice if the placemat has enough space around the edge to place a fork, spoon, knife and napkin. . It all depends on what you want.  Your fabric has to be 1/2 yard wide to cover the size of the placemat.

Here is a smaller placemat made from fushia sparkled felt (acrylic). It is machine washable. Try this easy craft in robins-egg blue or navy blue, black sparkled (which would look good with black toile dinnerware) and red.

To make the heart placemat, right click and print this pattern, or paste it on another page and print. This is for a small heart, so if you want something to put a larger plate on, just cut about an inch larger, outside the line, all around.

Place the pattern on the folded edge of your felt, and cut around it, like this:

Here it is, plain and pretty,

or decorated with a shiny rick-rack edging. I will be adding a matching coaster for a glass or cup.

You can make a larger pattern in the heart style you want, by using a  large paper bag for your pattern.

There is an abundance of felt projects on the web. Just go to Google, click on "images" and type in "felt crafts" and you will see pages and pages of creative felt ideas. This one here is really pretty http://www.flickr.com/photos/giantbutton/3311709964/

About the artist:  James Lee is a native of South Korea, who came to pursue art in the United States. Lovely Whatevers will have a large display of his art, soon.