The Darling Dogwood: Christmas in July -- Cookie Mats

Monday, July 17, 2023

Christmas in July -- Cookie Mats

Welcome to Christmas in July! When Siobhan of CDM365 Studios asked me about participating in her Christmas in July blog hop, my first thought after "Yes!" was that I needed to pick a project. I remembered back to Christmas 2021 when my son & I made a cookie mat to put Santa's cookies on--we put our cookies on the side of the fireplace, so we wanted something nice to be there for Santa. I decided that making some new ones would be a fun project for us the weekend of July 4th.

I got out my box of Island Batik scraps and some of my AccuQuilt dies and we went to town! I had set out some lighter scraps for backgrounds and let Fire Monkey (age 9) dictate which he wanted and what size. We both started with the dinosaurs and added Santa-inspired hats.

Then we moved on to Snowmen. Fire Monkey really got into it, he picked his fabrics, I added fusible web, then he ran the fabric through the Accuquilt cutter--he loves cranking the handle! He wanted to fuse in the shapes in place on his background, so I let him use the iron for that, with me hovering nearby. I hate stitching the fiddly little tiny circles for eyes, so we used fabric markers and drew on eyes instead.

This could be a fun holiday project with the kids of grandkids. Finished size doesn't really matter, we ended up with 2 that are essentially mug rugs and 2 that are more like placemats, and one sort of in-between. If you like the larger size, you could have kids make custom placemats for the holiday season. It doesn't matter if you use these for Santa's cookies or your own!

We used Accuquilt to cut our shapes, but don't despair if you don't have one. Trace cookie cutters for lots of fun shapes! When I was pregnant with Fire Monkey, my friends hosted a baby shower and we made a mobile by tracing shapes from cookie cutters onto felt. You can do the same thing with quilting cotton--fuse your fusible web to your fabric, then trace your cookie cutter shape and cut it out. You can do that beforehand with younger kids or have older kids do it themselves. Don't want to mess with tiny little decorations like we did? Use fabric markers!

Fire Monkey picking out fabric and Accuquilt dies

I used Hobbs Thermore batting because it's really thin and therefore good for placemats. For three of our cookie mats, I layered the top, batting, and backing and just used the satin stitching around the applique shapes as my only quilting. For the larger snowman mat, I did not stitch the appliques down but instead did a 1/2 inch crosshatch quilting, knowing that would keep all my applique shapes down. I used scraps of leftover bindings for all of them, so this entire project was all scraps. The 5th cookie mat, the one with the actual cookie in it, did not get finished in time, but I think I can have it done by the time Christmas actually rolls around! 😀