Sewing Placemats Personalized with Photos

I want to show you and teach you how to make this fun, I guess, applique art piece. It's on a old placemat. And I thought it would be kind of just a fun project, something quick, something that you can, well, you could make it as long as you want, or as involved as you want. You could do it with your children. I used fabric printer paper.

And I talk about that in just a second. And then I used various different fabrics, and I used some free motion. Actually, the whole thing is pretty much free motion stitching. And I just thought it's a great idea for, like, family dinners, or like a dinner party where you have friends, and family coming over and you can, you know, if you have pictures of them, great. If you don't then you can always grab them off of Facebook, and just save them to your computer.

And then you're able to print them off onto the fabric printer paper. You know what I mean. So, and then also they'll be able to know where they're sitting at the table, and you can either keep them for the next party, or you can give it to them as a memento of the great memories that you created that night, or day, whatever. So I've got, so you can see this is my son, and he likes penguins and turtles and green. So I just kind of made it kind of tailored to him.

And here are some examples of printer the inkjet fabric sheets I want to show you. You can get them at any fabric store or hobby store. They are different, like, textures, and thicknesses, and I'll show you. And they're sealed so you can't really see what's inside when you're first buying them. So it's kind of I just want to just let you know this before you're buying.

They're made by the same manufacturer, but this one that came out of this orange packet is a little bit translucent. You can see through it. There is paper on the back, but that tells me that if I can see through the fabric, and the paper that it is pretty translucent. This one's more opaque. It's got paper as well on the back, but you can't see what's underneath it at all.

So I used this paper, this fabric sheet when I was doing my projects, and it's the colorfast one. I used black and white, just it was my own personal preference. You can print color onto it as well. So let's get started, so. I printed out a couple of pictures of my family.

So I'll do me. It's when I turned 29 in this picture. Not really, but anyway, let's carry on, so. I will put this aside. I used fusible web to adhere everything on the one of my son.

This is what the fusible web looks like. You can get it at the fabric stores like I said, like the fabric sheets. There's a sticky side and it's kind of shiny. And then there's just the paper. So you will know which side is the fusible part.

And you don't want to get this stuff on your iron because it will gum up your iron a little bit, so. I will just take the back of the paper off, just peels off just like that. And when you're printing it in your printer it's just like printer paper, and you put the fabric side down, and it feeds through your printer just fine. And then you have different pictures on fabric, so. I'm going to, I cut this to size just like that.

So I'm going to iron it face down just in case there are some pieces of the fusible web that's on the upside. I don't want to get that on the iron, so. Here we go. And then we will take the paper off here. You can't really see, I don't believe that it's on here, but it's on here.

If it wasn't adhered properly, or you didn't have enough heat on it, or time, then it would stop pulling, and you would know that you would have to do it over again, so. I'm gonna just put this aside for now, and I'm going to just start decorating this placemat with different fabrics. And I'm just going to, like, lay things out, and just a general idea of where I would like things to go. And you can use the fusible web for this, or you can, I have some spray adhesive that I'm going to show you as well, just to give you some different ideas of how you can applique and adhere things to your pieces. So I just sprayed it a light coat of spray, and I just place it down here and so, you can get this as well at any fabric store, or you can get it online, whatever you prefer.

And so there we go. And I'll do this one too. It's really sticky. All right. So the great thing is, is that with free motion stitching you can add so much more to just these pieces of fabrics, and I'll show you how to do that right now.

This one, I think, I'm gonna make like a little flower. Let's do that. I'm just gonna bring this over. I have my free motion foot on my machine already. I'll drop my feed, oh, I've already dropped my feed dogs.

So when I'm moving my fabric, I can move it freely. And the feed dogs aren't trying to feed my fabric through. So, here we go. All right, so I've got red thread on here. You could use any color of thread.

And I think that's the fun of it. You can just really make it really artistic. And it doesn't need to be perfect just as long as you have fun. I try and get the edges as much as I can. There, so there's that one.

Now for this piece, I fussy cut it out of a sheet of fabric. And so to just cutting a strip. And I did that with this one as well, so. Actually, let's go with this one, and I'll show you how you can embellish it with just some thread. So I'm just going around the outline of this and then, hang on a second, I just got to cut that thread so that it allows me to be free.

It doesn't get caught up on the foot there, so. So that kind of adds some interest to it right there. And then you can go around here. I have one that's already done that we can look at. Let's see here.

Oh, sorry. Let's move this over a little bit more. And, see, I went through here, and then I changed out my thread, and I used green and I went around the outside of it. And then for this one I just did a swirl all the way around. This one I just did little, like, they look like little pebbles, and the flower and stuff.

So I'm going to place my picture. You know, you could put it anywhere. I'm just gonna put it here and then I'm going to iron it. And I'm going to use a Teflon sheet over top of it. And that protects your iron 'cause with these colorfast printer fabric sheets you can get stuff all over your iron, so.

I'm just gonna press that on there. And you can get this Teflon sheet at any fabric store as well. I use it a lot. Okay, all right. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to, I've got some other scraps of fabric, and this is another fun scrap buster that you can use up all your scraps, and just create something fun.

There, just like that. So I'm just laying them out just so that I can see what I might want to do. Oh, that looks like a little bow in my hair, who knew? All right, so, I will use the spray adhesive again. And you can also get glue sticks that also work as an adhesive, and they don't gum up your sewing machine needle.

So just like there. No, I don't really want to cover that. So I'm just gonna cut this off a little bit. And there's no rhyme or reason. It's just whatever looks good, whatever you feel happy with.

Oops, I might end up sticking my hand to the project here. So there's that. Maybe it's like a little party hat. Maybe I should add to it, nah, that's too much. All right, so now I'm going to sew those on.

And you can have as much fun with free motion as you want, or you can make it quick depending on how much time you have. Oops-a-daisy. So there are free motion gloves that you can get. Quilt stores have them. They just have extra little, like a little grip, but for something like this, it's so small, and I don't have to really maneuver a lot of fabric, but if I were to be doing that, I would use the gloves for sure, 'cause it gives you a little bit more control.

When I was thinking about this project, I was like, hmm, 'cause I've done wall hangings, and things like that. So I think this is just kind of just fun. And like I said, like, commemorate fun family dinners, and parties. You could do it for a birthday party if you want. So there we go.

See, free motion stitching can be really fun if you're not too critical of yourself, if you will. If you're just learning, and you just want to add some fun stitches I think it's awesome. And it can change the look of something so quickly. There are some free motion quilters that are just amazing, but here we go, so there's that. And I could even add, like, some lettering here, if I wanted to like a banner.

I could put Merry Christmas, or Happy Birthday, so. With the fabric sheets you could even make your own printed fabric. You could paint on it, or paint a picture, take a picture of it with your cell phone, or your camera and just print it on your printer. And then you can use that kind of printed fabric on whatever project you want. So if you want black with purple square polka dots you can just make it and do it.

The sky's the limit when it comes to being creative. Yeah, you could even take just some plain fabric where it doesn't have any kind of print. And then you could add some interest in texture with your free motion stitching. So I'm just gonna take this off. Here you go, so there you have it.

So you can, definitely, if I wanted to cover the whole thing like I did with my sons you can definitely do that like this, and then I fussy cutted these little penguins, and I stitched around them here, and just kind of placed them in fun places. And then I wanted to show you this other project that I did. It is a wall hanging, but it also has some printed pictures on fabric here. For the placemats, I mean, you could add, like, different yarn, and what-not. I wouldn't probably add any jewels like this, but because this is up on the wall I'm pretty comfortable with that, but as you can see here, I used a lot of decorative stitches, and just put it on a plain back, and did a bunch of different colors of the backings.

And then I just went around, I did some hearts, and I did some stars on this here, and some swirlies. And then I also did some free motion stitching on the back. So if you're just new to free motion stitching this is probably a great project for you to get kind of comfortable with it. It's not a big project. It's not going on a big quilt, or anything.

And then you can get kind of comfortable with the movements, and just the feel of it, so. I hope you enjoyed this project, and I hope that you make a lot of placemats for your family, and your fun dinner parties to come.