Placemat.

Don't forget to enter my Blogoversary Giveaway, click HERE to enter and best of luck!!!

Daisy only gets fed once a day. Some might say I’m starving her but she use to be extremely overweight. When she developed an allergy to red food dye the vet told me what food to switch her to and to only give her an 1/8 of a cup of food a day. You read that right, an 1/8 of a cup. That’s HALF of a 1/4 of cup. Crazy really, but it worked. About three months after her diet Daisy dropped her excess weight and hit her goal of 14lbs instead of the 21lbs she was carrying around. Look at the difference.
Before:

After:

Due to the fact that she only eats once a day, she constantly knocks over her food bowl as if asking for me. It drives me bananas. I’ve bought her food bowl placemats before but they aren’t the cutest things and she’s still able to knock her bowls off of them and make a ruckus.  I made something, that so far, has stopped her noisy habit.

You’ll need:

• 2 outer pieces of fabric cut 13'' x 17''
• 1 piece of interfacing or terry cloth cut 13'' x 17''
• 4 pieces of outer fabric or coordinating fabric cut 2'' x 17''.

(Iron your pieces before you get started, unlike myself, that didn’t get out the iron ONCE for this project, shame, shame.)

Gently knock the cat off your fabric.

Now make a fabric sandwich, the bottom outer piece place wrong side up, next is the terry cloth piece, then the top piece of fabric goes right side up. Line up your corners and pin everything in place, pin the edges and in the middle as well. If you’re going to machine quilt this, the more pins the better.

Quilt however you like. I did a triangle design. Starting at one of the corners and going towards the right in a diagonal line. When I reached the bottom edge of my fabric, I turned the fabric around to go down at another diagonal line. Over and over and over I did this until I got the look I wanted.

You can see where the triangle/diagonal lines start and stop in the pic below. (I hope!)

Set this aside and pick up the 4 strips of fabric for your binding. If you don’t know how to make your own binding it’s really simple.

Lay one strip right side up, and horizontal. At the far end of the fabric, take another strip and lay it wrong side up vertical, but over the edge of the horizontal strip. You’ve made a square with the two pieces of fabric on the corner…see?  Now sew a diagonal line from the top of the ‘square’ you’ve made the the bottom right corner of the ‘square’ you made.  It should look like this:

When you turn the vertical piece of fabric up, it will extend your previous strip as if it were one piece.

Do this with all 4 of your pieces until you have a long piece of binding ready to go. Press with an iron, unlike the slacker I am. I’ll de better next time, I promise!
Now, with the right sides together, pin the binding to the front of the quilted rectangle. Miter the edges.

Sew all the way around. Then turn the binding out, like so.  Your front piece should look like this.

If you flip your placemat over it should look like this.

Fold the edges of your binding over to touch the edges of your quilted piece.

Press with an iron and then fold over again. (Sorry I guess I forgot to take a picture of this step.) Pin in place.
Now turn the entire thing over and sew the binding in place. Try to sew in the ditch you created when you first sewed the binding on.

Press one last time with an iron if you like and voila you’re done!. A super cute placemat for your dinning room table…

…or your pet.

After all, Little Ms. Skinny Daisy needs a nice place to chow down too.