Weekend Christmas Sewing

Working a full-time job, I only get to sew on the weekends (if I feel well enough).  This weekend, I was able to start the Christmas placemats for my sister.  A design I made up myself.  When I first saw the Riley Blake Christmas Candy fabric, I fell in love with it!  My sister loves gingerbread men in her kitchen for Christmas, and I knew I wanted to do something with this fabric.  Well, here is what I came up with.

I started with printed paper and made a design of what I wanted.  From this printed paper, I began my work with the real fabric.

Backing fabric and fusible fleece, and then my two top fabrics.

I found a printable gingerbread pattern online to trace.

Traced my gingerbread man onto heat-and-bond and then bonded that to my brown fabric.

I then fussy cut out the candy from the fabric to decorate my gingerbread man.  I again used the heat-and-bond (extra heavy) for this application.

After I decorated him with candy, he needed some "frosting" so I free-motion quilted some frosting look swirls all around the edge of him, plus this helps to hold him down on the fabric.

I turned the backing to the front and top stitched.  I also quilted a zigzag stitch every 2" across the placemat and it looks so cute!  Now I have 5 more to go!