OLFA Art Knife: Graphic Placemats

Hey, everyone. My name is Emily. And today I am sharing a very festive project with you. We will be making these graphic place mats. I love to use them for any celebration we have in our house, whether it's a birthday, a Christmas uh Valentine's Day or not even a holiday, but like a retirement or even National Donut Day. I think it's so fun to have a little personalized bit of celebration that is waiting at your table or maybe for breakfast that just makes things a little bit more fun and festive. So I want to show you today the technique on how to make the placemats. You can make the placements, say whatever you'd like. But the key to getting the wording cut out just perfectly is our alpha art knife. It gives you precise cutting and it's like a fussy cutting if you will, if you're a quilter and know that term, it's kind of like a fussy cutting, but it is so fun and so beautiful. So let's get started with cutting our shapes and our sizes and then we'll work on the lettering together. So you will need a couple pieces of fabric for your background and your foreground. You will also need a piece of fabric for your lettering and then you'll need a separate piece of fabric for your edging just like it is here. So background, foreground, your lettering and your edging and they can match, they cannot match, you can use up scraps whatever you'd like. But the big piece is cut 11 by 17, your edges will the two inch strips and then you'll need to cut this lettering area another 11 by 17 because I'll show you in the technique that we use. You'll want the whole area to be taken up with this space with your lettering. So that when we cut it out, we can use the background as kind of our spacing or our um, like setting and how we set the letter. So background will be cut to 11 by 17. So I'm gonna cut that first if you need to give your, um, fabric a quick iron, always feel free to do that. So my two background pieces are cut 11 by 17 and then I will need to cut the same top piece or lettering piece out of the same size. So now that this piece is cut, I'm going to set this aside and cut my two inch strips and just make sure that you cut enough yardage so that the two inches can go on the 17 inch side, the 17 inch side for front and back. So 4 17 inch or 18 inch strips along with enough along the 11 inch side as well. So it will essentially be eight strips, four for the front four for the back. Two of them being longer for the top and two being shorter for the sides. So I have my four strips for the front and four strips for the back ready to go from what I had just cut and now I'm going to iron on my interfacing. Every interfacing is a little bit different, but your interfacing is just basically um, thin glue that kind of gets activated from the heat of your iron. And it looks like this. It's this webbing sort of material that looks like it's on the back of parchment paper. And I am simply going to iron my interfacing onto the back side of this sort of aqua green color. Now, mine, I'm using solid, so I don't really have a right and wrong side so you can choose whatever, whatever your right and wrong side is. But I've precut my, my piece to be this 11 by 17 piece. And all I'm gonna do is line up my interfacing piece and I'm gonna start pressing. Now, there's a difference between pressing and ironing. Ironing and ironing is when you move your iron around and you're ironing a shirt pressing is when you leave it, leave the iron set on top of the, the whatever you're ironing. So it's using kind of the the weight of the iron to press your interfacing in place. The reason why you want to press interfacing versus iron, it is ironing is with this motion and you want to make sure that you're not stretching out the interfacing underneath. It's not the end of the world if you do. But once you get everything glued in place and you'll kind of see that the paper starts sticking to the fabric. You can start to kind of see that over here in this area that I've already ironed, then you can iron back and forth, but really work on pressing your interfacing in place across your whole 11 by 17 piece of fabric. I think everything is about set in place. Sometimes I like to just go over the edges a little bit more just to make sure everything is and you'll be able to see this is kind of all one big piece. It's nice and glued together if you will. So I'm gonna set my pressing mat and my iron aside and get out my cutting mat because this is where the fun really is. So, like I said before, you want your entire lettering, I think it looks best if your entire lettering takes up the entire kind of surface or foreground of your place mat, less the edging. So I've decided to make a Happy Birthday place mat today and all I did was write out the words Happy Birthday and um turn them kind of into an outline on my computer and then I printed them on two pieces of 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, which happens to fill up the entire 11 by 17 area. So all we're gonna do is cut out these letters by placing my paper right on top of my um fabric that I had just ironed my interfacing to and this is gonna become the glu letters that will become our graphic placemat lettering or wording. Now, of course, you can translate this very, the same technique into a little graphic like a little bird or a tree or a flower or something really simple. If you have your printed shapes on a piece of paper, it's easy to use your art knife and cut them out precisely so that it becomes kind of like a template. If you will, I'm going to be using the Ulfa art knife, which is one of my favorite tools in my craft room. The blade that I will be using is the curved carving blade. Now, this curved carving blade is absolutely perfect for precise cuts like this because it's curved and I'm gonna show you how I'm able to rock the blade into the edges that we don't have over cutting on the place mat letters. So the first thing I'm going to do is you can use pins, you can use anything to kind of keep this in place. I love these um little pin weights because I feel like it's just an easy thing to keep right on top here and it keeps everything nice and nice. And in place, the first cut I'm going to make is by placing the tip of my art knife onto my letter and then kind of rocking down so that I'm inserting and slicing between the fabric and the paper. Now, when I get to an edge, just like the edge here of the happy birthday, I'll slowly begin to lift up until the point reaches the very point of the age. The reason this art knife is amazing is not only because it's honed in just like all of the other alpha rotary blades that we already know and love. It's because it is so precise by using this rocking technique and it's so sharp and this blade does not even move a tiny in instance. So I will just continue cutting out all of these letters in my happy birthday wording. You can already see the letter lifting up. When I get to an edge, I can kind of slow down and just work my knife around that corner edge and press as I'm coming down these long edges. Look at this. This is our first letter coming out right here. So what I want to make sure I do is set aside each letter and then set but keep this in place because we will be using this, this background access fabric or excuse me, background excess paper as like our template on how we're gonna lay the letters back out. One other thing to point out is when you have a inside of like the a for instance, this triangle inside, I would highly recommend to cut the inside out first because if you cut away the outside of the letter or this kind of outer rim of the letter first and try and cut the inside out second. Um The, the cut is actually probably going to be so good that your, your letter is gonna wiggle around and move around because it will already be free from the bigger paper. So I recommend cutting this inside out first. Ok. So now that all of my letters are cut out, I've saved them up here and I have my background ready to go. So now I'm going to press my letters onto the foreground of the front of my place mat. So I'm gonna grab my iron and pressing mat to do that and we'll move this stuff off to the side and save this piece, the paper piece. Remember this can just be a really cool maybe background that you maybe iron onto something else. So maybe you don't throw that away if you don't want to. But I now have my iron and pressing that and now I'm simply going to take the foreground of the front of my place Matt, lay out my sort of template, which is gonna give the spacing exactly how I want it to be and I'm gonna start to lay out my letters before I lay every, every letter I'm going to take my, pinch your fingers and kind of a little bit if you kind of start to wiggle or rub it separates the parchment from the fabric itself and you'll see that on the back side of the fabric, there's like a little bit of a shininess and that's what the, that's the glue or the interfacing. So essentially you just want to peel off the paper backing, set that aside and you're left with a piece of fabric perfectly cut, which has the, the letter in it. So I'll just continue to do that, wiggle my fingers back and forth and keep taking out my various letters that goes here and fill in all of my spaces. Ok. So I have my last letter, but I'm going to place if it's ever sticky like this, simply lick your finger and it should, there we go. Give you some grip to be able to pull that backing off. But now that I have my last letter, you can kind of fidget it around and make sure everything is in place. The one thing you will want to do is kind of lift up a little bit on, on your um paper template to make sure that the letters are underneath the template itself. Because when we give it a quick press you wanna make sure that the letters don't get fused to the paper, but rather they get fused to the fabric. So, just kind of work your fingers around and make sure that your paper is over top of your letters instead of under it. And you can kind of peel it away as you go. There we go. So I have everything just perfectly spaced, just like I did in my paper template. And now I'm just gonna be a little bit fussy and move that a little bit down. But now all I'm going to do is press just like we did before, not iron, but press your letters into place. And it's so much more important in this case to press because if we iron, we're gonna be moving these letters all around. So again, if you need to reference the specific instructions on the actual brand of the interfacing that you purchased, go ahead and do that. But a good press and you'll start to see these letters actually fuse to this background of the placement. Ok? So now that all my letters are pressed into place, I am going to applicate my letters on which will just give it more sturdiness or washable ability. We call it wash ability in my house because with little kids, everything needs to have a high wash ability and I'm just going to stitch. You can choose any application that you want. It can be a straight stitch which is what I will be doing. It can be a zig zag stitch. It can be a fancy stitch. But you don't even have to do this stuff if this feels pretty tricky. But I would recommend it because then these letters will stick on really, really well. So I'm going to grab my sewing machine and get started applicate. So I'm going to choose to just do a straight stitch right around the outside of the letters. Um, just to adhere the letters to the place mat. And I'm choosing to use, I think sometimes the, the thread color is the funniest. I'm choosing to use kind of a hot pink thread color because I would really, I really want to make sure that these letters stand out and that they're as much color as possible on the celebration place mats. So I'm just gonna straight stitch all the way around. And then of course, as I come to these curved edges, I'll just slow down. I find that sometimes on curved edges, it can be a little bit tricky to get all the way around the edge um, in the bulk of the fabric. So I usually lift up my foot and then you can make it around a little bit easier so that you're not kind of forcing it as much. And you'll kind of feel that underneath the foot of your need, the foot of your machine along with your needle. And as always, when you come to a sharp corner, leave your needle down, lift your foot and just pivot your fabric. So when I get to the end of my letter, a lot of times um when you're applicate, you have the choice to kind of do the backwards forward stitch or to anchor your stitch. I choose to anchor the stitch because I really like the kind of the seamless look of the one stitch around the edge. And I don't want that bulk of the backwards forwards. So I am just going to trim off my thread and look at, I think it turned out so cute because you can see kind of the outline. It makes it more kind of drawn and designer and I'm just going to continue working around each letter, applicate it in a straight stitch for the whole happy birthday words. OK. So I just finished applicate all of my letters onto my foreground of my um place mat pattern. So now I'm going to add my two inch stripping along the edge. So remember we had cut um or I had cut four of these really long pieces of two inch strips. I'm just gonna cut them in half because that's just how my favorite was. Now, I'm left with 22 inch strips that are going to go along the long edges of both the foreground or the front of the, the place mat and the back of the place mat. So, so these two inch strips along the front of the long side, which would be the top and the bottom and then the long side, which would be the top and the bottom of the back and you'll be sewing them right sides together. You'll notice that likely your fabric or you'll want your fabric to kind of go off of the edge here so that you have an extra two inches. And we want that because then we're able to add our two inch strip onto the short sides. So I'm using probably a quarter inch seam allowance like I always do and just sew these right sides together along these four long sides on the front and the back of the place mat. Then I'm repeating this on the long side of the backside of my place mat, right sides together with a quarter of an inch of a seam allowance. My long sides are sewn and before I sew my short sides on, I want to both press my seam allowance to the left side or the right side or press them open, whichever you prefer. And then I want to trim the edges. So I'm going to move my sewing machine out of the way and I will go to my pressing mat next. So I am going to simply press my seams open or to the side. I know there's a big debate about whether seams get pressed open or to the side. I'm choosing just to press my seams to the side so that my edge or my, um, edging is nice and flat and I will do this along both of these long edges. Sometimes I like to tug my seams open just a little bit to make sure all the fabric is nice and open. But if you flip it over, you'll kind of start to see the beginnings of our finished product, which I love and then I'll repeat the same for the front. You can see I didn't clip any of my strings on the back, which is totally fine. It, it doesn't bother me because I know that this is going to be the inside of the place man. If it bothers you go ahead and trim all those um threads if you want to. So this is nice and flat, but I still have to trim off these edges here because this, I want this to be nice and flush. So I'm just going to move my pressing mat off to the side and bring in my cutting board and I am going to layer both my front and my back together and I'm going to line up these edges just like this. That this edge is one nice long line. And then all I'm going to do is simply trim off this excess. Here. There's a ton of different ways that you can add edging to place mats or pillows or napkins. And some people like a beveled edge, some people do a flush edge just like this. So if you have a different technique of how you want to add on your edging, please feel free to do that. I feel like this is just very easy no matter what kind of pattern fabric you have. So it's kind of a tried and true method for me. All right. So long sides are trimmed up. So we have our nice long edge on our front, on the top and the bottom for both the front and the back. And now I'm gonna go back to my sewing machine to add on this short strip in the same way, right sides together with a quarter of an inch seam. So I'll begin to sew my short edges of the front side of the place mat and the back side of the place mat, both on the left and right sides with my same quarter inch seam allowance. Ok. So now that all four short edges are sewn, we're gonna go back to our pressing mat just like we did before to press our edges flat and then trim off the excess before we put the whole place matt together. So I will just press my seams. I again chose to press my seams outward towards the edge. And to me that works really well because these edges of the, um, edging, the edges of the edging kind of tend to lay really flat when you press them outward. So that's how I chose. But again, like I said before, if you wanted to cho choose to um iron them open, you absolutely can. So do the same for the back side of the placement and the front side and then we'll move our pressing mat out of the way again and go back to our cutting mat just like we did the first time to trim off these excess sections. So, just like before I'm gonna line up my long edges here along the outside of the long edges and just kind of do the best I can. And this just kind of helps I think keep everything nice and square or square. I if possible and then I can line up my, a straight edge, use my rotary blade and just trim everything up really nicely. So now the very last step to our place matt is to put right sides together. So you're putting your lettering and your backside right sides together. And if you want a pin in place, you absolutely can put a few pins in here to get everything um nice and straight with each other. Although I do feel like the way that we've cut our edges, it kind of is a little bit of a fail proof way to make sure everything is nice and square. And I'm going to stitch a quarter inch or a little bit less of a stitch all the way around the outside, four edges of the place mat. The only thing I want to make sure of is I'm going to leave an opening that is about, I don't know, three or four inches along the short side, so I can flip my place mat right side out before we top stitch. So let's go back to our sewing machine one last time or almost last time to stitch the place mat closed and then we'll just have to give it a quick iron and stitch one more time before we are finished with our celebratory place mat. So remember when you're stitching this outside edge to leave about a two or three inch opening on that short side so that we can flip or place that right side out before you stitch all the way around. And remember when you get to the edge, come right up to the edge, leave your needle down, lift your press or foot and pivot your fabric to keep everything nice and flat. So I'll flip this right side out. This is the fun part, poke out these corners as best as you can. Sometimes I like to wiggle them between my fingers. And then the one thing we need to do before we finish up and stitch everything closed is just to press the um top really well. And the reason that we do this is because it gives you're able to kind of wiggle out these seams along the edge and it'll flatten everything else. Everything out nice and square. And um, one technique I like to use is to kind of use my pincher fingers and wiggle back and forth, kind of along the edge just to make sure the steam just to make sure that your edge is nice and um, flat and nice and kind of square or right to the outside when you get to the opening that you had left here, what I like to do is kind of notice my seam allowance um along this edge right here and I'll just kind of take my fingers and tuck it in so that it makes a nice edge, kind of pretending that it's sewn underneath. Even though we know that it's not, this is a little bit bulky or bulgy. I should say I'm gonna tuck that in. There we go once more. And then you can't even tell that it's an open seam. Ok. So I have one more finishing touch before a placemat is completed and that is to do a top stitch. I'm gonna move my pressing that off to the side, bring my sewing machine back in and I am just going to do a really simple top stitch along the outer edge. And the top stitch is like usually about an eighth of an inch ish along the outside edge. It's kind of to finish it. I'm using the same bright pink threads so that it kind of ties everything together and the, the function of it is to make sure that we close up that opening um that we just left open to turn it right, to turn our place mat right side out. So this will not only give it a finished look, it'll actually finish the place mat and then we are ready to celebrate and use our place mats, which I'm so excited about. So I'm just going to trim my threads. It's all stuck back here. There we go, trim my thread, push my sewing machine off to the side and there we have it. Our happy birthday, graphic place mat that I think turned out so well. We have our hip, hip. So we have every celebration ready to celebrate with my family. And thanks to this awesome art knife. This project, this graphic placemat project was the ultimate and easy fussy cutting technique that I think has me hooked to make more.