I was asked if I could make round placemats by a friend. My initial reaction was, ROUND?!? How the heck is the binding going to work out? I am so thankful for all the wonderful quilters who blog about their work, though, because I quickly found a wonderful tutorial on sewing circular quilted placemats. Perfection!
Well, with nothing left to do but make a few as a test, I went digging in my stash and found a beautiful charm pack of Violet Craft’s Waterfront Park fabric line. The 5″ blocks were not going to be big enough to get me to a 15″ circular diameter placemat, so I added in some fun Dear Stella polka dots.
Round Placemats – Ready for Quilting
One of the things that I liked about the tutorial / pattern was that it called for quilting before cutting the final circle for the placemat. That made a lot of sense to me. I did some quick straight line stitching to create a loose grid pattern, creating about 1″ squares.
Round Placemats – Template
My handy and helpful husband worked with me to create a 15″ round plexiglass template using a rivet spacer in the garage.
Round Placemats – Ready for Binding
I changed things up a bit when it came time to put on the binding. Instead of sewing to the front as the tutorial calls for, I stitched down to the back first and used a seam allowance between 1/4″ and 3/8″. Clover clips were the perfect tool to use to hold the binding in place as I worked my way around sewing down the binding to the top.
Round Placemats
It was much easier to ease the binding around the generous circle than I had thought, and I am really pleased with how these samples turned out!
Round Placemats – Table Setting
It is pretty liberating to try something new and find that it isn’t nearly as hard or scary as it seemed at the beginning.
Those look great! What a fun idea 🙂 PS a husband who makes plexiglass templates for you… Awesome!!
Nicely done! They look great
I’m not really into squares but they look pretty cool on round placemat 😉
These are lovely! Great choice of fabrics and the binding looks perfect!
super cute!!
Those look great! The machine binding looks flawless! I am hanging out with my parents and thinking about making THEM placemats, but was trying to think of more interesting shapes than rectangles. Perhaps I’ll attempt some circular ones in the future!
Pretty! I can really see knocking out a few of these for holiday presents this year. They would make great FMQ practice too… the possibilities are almost endless 😀
These turned out great!! So happy you enjoyed the tutorial. : ) And, what a hubby you have cutting a template for you – wow!
They turned out perfectly! I would never have guessed it was your first time making them. Did you cut your binding on the bias?
Love how the squares get softened by the polka dots!
So neat. I am going to have to try this.
Good for you! These are super! Now I want to try some round table toppers for the center of the table…
How can I get them to lay flat, do they have to be quilted all over??
I just came across this and love it! I have been looking for a simple way to make round placemats but most of them are so complicated and involve a lot of measuring. This is perfect. Thank you for sharing!