Tea With Friends

At our annual quilt guild Christmas party, my friend Rosemary gave me a cute quilt kit for "Tea Leaf Ornaments"

The finished ornaments, as pictured on the pattern, reminded me of Cathedral Windows, although I have no idea if they are similarly constructed.  Anyway, it was a new-to-me technique, so I decided to have a little fun and give it a try.

You start by folding the red and green squares on the diagonal,  with wrong sides together:

Next, you place a pair of the folded squares on top of a plain square,

and sew baste the triangles to keep them attached:

Then you use the squares as you would use any other fabric squares and make pinwheel blocks:

When you open out the folded edges,  it reveals the plain fabric underneath:

Then came the tricky part.  You need to sew the folded edges down so they will stay open.  I tried pinning first:

I could see there was trouble ahead, trying to maneuver around those pinheads.  Then I remembered that I had a fabric glue stick:

Surprisingly, it worked like a charm, and held the folded edges nicely while I sewed them down.  In retrospect, I should have used invisible thread for that part of the sewing, but I didn't have any on hand and I wanted to keep going.

The pattern was for making tree ornaments, but I decided I wanted a mug rug instead.  By adding a couple of fourpatch units, I would end up with a nice size.

A little light quilting, and then all it needed was a binding.  While I was in the mood to try new things, I decided to try a technique I had read about where the backing gets folded around to the front to make the binding.  It starts out looking like this:

and ends up looking like this:

That particular binding technique is probably better suited to a larger project, but in a pinch, it was fine.  All that was left to do was make up a nice cup of tea and enjoy my new mug rug!

The tea I chose was also a gift from the party.  My friend Linda gave me a tin of Downton Abbey English Rose tea.  The rasberries in the tea give it a lovely red color, just right for the season.

Speaking of seasons, season 5 of Downton Abbey is just around the corner.  Looks like I'm prepared, how about you?