Project Quilting 17.5: My Complements

I'm jumping in late with my Project Quilting project this week because I made a grave mistake: I finally basted my Blue Coin quilt on Monday.  It has been ready and waiting since before Christmas, and the fates finally aligned for me to get it done.  And once I have a freshly basted quilt, I cannot resist immediately starting to quilt it.  So all my sewing time this week was taken up by ditch-stitching the horizontal lines in it.  I didn't want to switch over from my walking foot to my piecing foot so I was "stuck".

But the good news is, I finished the last horizontal line today (and the trimming) and was able to move on to my Project Quilting project!  I started this week with a brief refresher on what complimentary colors are and I absolutely fell in love with this paint-swatch demonstration of them (you can see it in the splash screen above if you don't want to click the link).  I then spent a lot of time thinking while ditch-stitching about what I wanted to do with my pair of colors.  I knew it had to be a small project because I was going to start it late, and I decided to make something that has been on my "want to sew" list for a while: a coaster for under the lamp in the kid's playroom to replace the dish cloth I had thrown down to protect the wood.

The circle base lent itself well to the circle in the image, and the fact that the piece was going under a lamp gave me the freedom to sew without worrying about it being perfect (plus those slightly odd pieces seem to be the most popular somehow!).  So I dug out my long-neglected curve templates and decided I could totally do an inset circle with no pins.  And...I almost did.  There's just a small fold in the fabric (again, lamp coaster in a kid-centric area).

I rounded the corners to match the lamp base and inner circle, then brown-bagged it instead of making bias binding to finish it.  I top-stitched around the outside edge, then did a spiral in the big circle just for fun.  The back is a piece of soft blue flannel leftover from my Amelia quilt - I like backing coasters in flannel instead of quilting cotton.

There are no leader and ender blocks this week - my only piecing was making the inset circle so I didn't need them!  I hope you enjoyed this fun little mini project - I'm linking up with the Project Quilting linky party as always.

Thanks for stopping by!