Scrappy Trivet and Coasters

I have to be honest, this project was a whole lot more fun to start than it has been to finish. It’s really fun to start, though. Like, really fun. All you need are strips of fabric and batting 2.5 inches wide. Then you fold them into quarters and sew down the middle to form long fabric ropes. Once you have a bunch of those, start sewing them together in pairs using a wide zig-zag stitch. Then do the same to sew the pairs together. Once you have a bunch of pairs together, cut your resulting strip of rope into squares, much like this:

And then, you know, stop there and throw the squares in your UFO pile because the next part is just. Ugh. UGH.

Binding. So the idea is you can bind both raw edges to create coasters, or you can make trivets by binding one raw edge each of 4 (or more if you want to make something bigger), then sewing the blocks together (raw edges out), and binding the whole thing. But here’s the problem: once you start the binding, you’re sewing through something like 10 layers of fabric and 4 layers of batting. I’ve been through an entire batch of microtex needles and both of my machines and it keeps skipping stitches. Needless to say, I’m beyond frustrated.

A minimal amount of internet research has told me that I may be “pushing” the fabric through the machine rather than just guiding it. I don’t think I was (I do everything perfectly, dammit!), but I will give it one more shot with the walking foot and see if that helps at all.

Otherwise, I may just leave the edges on the coasters raw. I kinda like it, and I can tell myself it goes with the scrappy, crooked aesthetic.