Outside our kitchen window is a star magnolia tree and it provides us with plenty to look at year round. Delicate scented white flowers in the early spring, lush green foliage all summer and when the leaves turn in the fall, they are a beautiful orangey yellow.
The leaves continue to fall and soon the branches will be bare. These bare branches give us hours of winter entertainment watching our own backyard bird channel. Right now, the ground is a carpet of gold under this tree!
At the neighborhood coffee hangout, chilled cups with straws and clinking ice are replaced with steaming mugs of various delicious concoctions. My friend who is a coffee lover, put in a request for a set of mug rugs. Her only requirement was that I incorporate some sort of leaf element into the design. I had free reign with the rest.
Inspired by our magnolia tree, I picked out some coordinating fabric, some linen and was all set to begin. I cut out a few leaf shapes and fused them onto the linen, then did some free motion sewing around each leaf to secure it. The rest was just standard sew-baste-bind.
Ever have a project that you have in your head and everything goes according to plan? I’ve never ever had that happen to me, and this time was no exception! I was adding the binding to the last piece and realized that I didn’t have anymore of the red fabric left. I was shy of just three inches, arrrgh! I went back to the shop where I purchased this fabric and they didn’t have any in stock either, arrrrgh again!! I was on a deadline and so I didn’t have time to re-bind all of them using a different fabric.
Plan B. I decided to add an accent fabric to make the binding strip longer and so I added it to the top part of the last little mug rug which meant that I had to cut the red bit shorter. There was no going back once I cut!
I folded the binding over the raw edge of each mug rug and hand sewed it to the back. They looked great except that stripey bit!
The finished mug rugs were handed over to my friend with me fumbling over the words to explain my binding dilemma.
She loved the set and said this was exactly what she wanted. Guess which one is her favorite? The one with the scrappy binding 🙂
Alice
Those are crazy beautiful !!!
Nicky
Beautiful! You’re truly an artist!
littleblackdogsa
True, so very beautiful. Thanks for the great sharing experience, it feels like I am there. 🙂
tara
SO Nice! Plan B’s are sometimes the best 🙂
Aparna Mulgund
Absolutely stunning! And I like the scrappy binding the best too.love the idea of mug rugs, rather than the small coasters. I may give this a try, if you do not mind..