I made a pillow for a friend this week.
That part was easy. Envelope pillows are super fast projects, but I wasn’t sure what to do with my leftover fabric. If you’ve ever bought a licensed print, (such as a football team logo) you know that it’s considerably more expensive than other fabrics. Because it costs more, I hate to waste it, and because I’m not much of a sports fan, I wanted to go ahead and use the scraps right away. Fabric coasters are an excellent way to use scrap fabric. You can also make cocktail napkins in almost the exact same way.
Start with a template. Using a ruler and a sheet of regular printer paper, cut a 4 1/2″ square. Next, cut as many squares of fabric as you can get from the scraps. Then cut half that number of squares of felt. If you cut 20 fabric squares, cut 10 felt squares.
To pin your coasters, put two pieces of fabric squares right sides together. Then put one felt square on top, against the wrong side. Pin in place.
Stitch around three sides.
Turn the coaster inside out, with one side left open.
Fold the raw edges under. You may want to pin it in place or iron flat, but I didn’t do either.
Stitch all the way around the coaster. I also chose to do a few stitches across the top. In my case, they are hidden in the plaid lines, but you can see them if you look closely. This part is optional, but it does help the coasters to lay flat. It’s probably best to do it this way so that they won’t warp if you ever want to throw them in the washing machine. You could get creative and use a contrasting color or stitch across the coaster in a design of some sort.
It’s so easy – I made all of these in under an hour.
***Note, if you use this tutorial to create cocktail napkins, increase your template square to 6 1/2″ and omit the felt.***
Beautiful!