Coaster of the month: May

Poor slightly deformed coaster front

beloved monkey coaster

Coaster a month...why not?   I like to drink things, and summer is coming up which means iced beverages galore.  We use glass topped coasters in the computer room, and I can't say how terrifying it is when the condensation makes the coaster stick to the glass for a few seconds before it disconnects itself and crashes to the desk.  It almost always happens on hot days (or with margaritas!)  so two years ago I started putting iced things on a napkin instead.  However my husband can't seem to resist the lure of his Monkey coaster (I like to think it's because we picked out our coasters several years ago on a pretty fantastic vacation, so it's deeply sentimental to him!) and so this is still happening with regularity.  It seems like a fabric coaster is in order to calm my nerves.

Jelly roll strips

Used leftover strips from my kitchen mat to make triangles for the front.  For the back I used the the scraps left over to make an abstract mishmash.  I sewed the batting to the first side before sewing the right sides of the fabric together, turning it right inside out & hand stitching the opening closed. In retrospect I should've sewn the batting to the back side instead since it was the one with the abstract pattern - it did need to be sewn through with a zigzag stitch on the back, as the scraps were so small I didn't have a seam allowance available to secure them all together. Lesson #42 learned - think things through! (should've been lesson #1 probably ;)

coaster back

 I am sure my projects can and will improve over the next year. I mean, it can't get too much worse!  I'll use seam binding in the future to provide a nice square look to the corners when my bamboo skewer doesn't seem to be vicious enough to stab them into pointy-ness.


Pondering trying a porthole for next month's coaster, I've been really starstruck with some of the porthole quilts I've been seeing.