How to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Recently I had a major fail with one of my quilts. It resulted in cutting off the already quilted borders and rethinking the binding. I'd used this amazing African fabric for the pieced border and it was too beautiful to throw in the bin. What to do?

Here is one border cut into strips about 12" long. You can see the quilting.

This is the reverse of those strips - yummy fabric too.

 

This is the binding from the quilt which I'd actually sewn on twice already trying to remedy the "wavy" problem.



In a light bulb moment I decided to make some placemats! Here are those three strips with fusible 1/4" bias zig-zagged over the seams. They needed a couple of goes to secure the raw edges.

Doesn't look too flash on the back but who'll look there!

 And here's the finished article including the old binding. I had enough borders to make six placemats and I love them!

 

A great lesson in recycling or is that UP- cycling. I can never tell.

I'm off O/S on Friday for a month so blogging might be a problem. I'll be posting to FB more often here. Hope you all get lots of sewing done and I'll have next year's Springwood Community Quilt Show raffle quilt to work on while I'm away.