My Swanky Strawberry Tea Mat
Yeah… its just a glorified potholder. And it will be covered in cupcake batter and burnt cheese within a week. But just let me have a brief moment with my tea mat please.
And yes, I realize that strawberries are not in season at all and that this is an interesting choice for a winter project. I was working on making some new potholders for my grandparent because the ones I made for them a couple years ago have been well loved and slightly barbequed :) But! as I was looking at my saved pins for potholder inspiration (that’s a phrase I never thought I would use!) I came across this tea mat made by Minki Kim. I love her method of sewing illustration and would like to try to use it more. It isn’t the most durable decoration and not good for anything you’re gonna machine wash but it holds up fine to normal use. So… to make a long story short this was just a fun impulse sew that distracted me from my task of making actual functional potholders.
Sewing illustration is somewhat similar to embroidery but you incorporate colorful scraps of fabric. My method is to cut out all my fabric shapes and then glue them into place with fusible web (which I have a ridiculous 2 yards of because I bought it thinking it was lightweight interfacing! I can get a little excitable at fabric stores!). Next, I draw out where I’m gonna stitch with an erasable pen. Finally, I put my free motion foot on my machine and lower my feed dogs and then just stitch along the edges of the shapes. It would have been really simply if I hadn’t wasted 30 minutes trying to get the tension right with some merenized cotton thread. The thread was the perfect color but I couldn’t for life of me get the tension right. I changed the needle, rethreaded an obscene amount of times, and even took off my stitch plate and cleaned my machine. Once I finally resigned myself to failure, I realized it was probably just the thread. Yep, instant success when I switched to all purpose cotton. Well, lesson learned, leave mercerized cotton to topstitching.
Isn’t that little strawberry label adorable! I was mourning my lack of suitable labels for this project when I realized I have a whole quarter yard of this perfectly scaled strawberry print. I just cut out a little strip, folded the sides in and sewed along the edge. Perfect!
And, of course, I had to do the classic mug rug photo. I really don’t know what to call this little rectangle of batting and linen. Potholder, hot pad, mug rug, tea mat, crumb-catcher??? Unfortunately, my desire for the classic drink and treat mug rug photo led me to drink coffee at 4’oclock which is not a good idea for me.
You can really tell I’m running out of things to talk about when I start dissecting the background of each photo. But I had to take a couple of picture in my old strawberry patch because, seriously, who knew strawberry patches were so beautiful in mid-December! The leaves are a gorgeous range of fall colors - long after everything else has turned to sticks and mud.
Project Overview: Strawberry (I guess we’ll call it a…) Tea Mat
Time: 3 hours (not counting my fruitless battle with mercenized thread)
Pattern: nata
Materials: Cotton scraps, linen, insulated batting, fusible web
Date finished: 12/21 (and I actually posted it within the same week, a miracle!)
Cost: $0
