A Mug Rug - quilting practice

After recently finishing my second quilt, I decided I'd like to learn and practice more about quilting - but with smaller projects!

So I decided to look at mug rugs!  

A couple of years ago, I made myself a cute pink one:

And I thought that these mug rugs are the perfect thing to practice on because:

1. They are small and don't take long to make.

2. They are small and so are great stashbusters.

3. They are practical and useful and if I decide I have too many of them myself, they would be great gifts to friends!

I also want to follow more of other people's tutorials online, so I can learn more about what I find both good and not so good in the way things are explained or presented and so use that to improve my own tutorials!

So - yesterday I found a tutorial over at The Curious Quilter.

I chose to use scraps from my blue box to make this one..

And chose these:

I found straight away that I wished the measurements were in both cm and inches as my cutting board is in cm, but the tutorial measurements were only in inches!

I found early on when I was posting tutorials that people emailed and commented asking me to convert the measurements for them.  Any new tutorials I make now - I do put both measurements in, but some of my older ones don't.

So I've added a widget in my sidebar that you can use to convert cm to inches!!! (see - just look to your right and it should be there.)

But back to the tutorial I was using.

I found it reasonably straightforward to follow, and the photos - although small - can be clicked upon to make them full screen size which was great!

I used my trusty quilting arm on my little sewing machine:

Then came the binding.

Now so far, I'm not too hot on binding, so I was happy to see this tutorial showed a different way of binding - that did not involve mitred corners! (using one long strip of binding and having to carefully fold and stitch the corners neatly!)

For this tutorial you did the binding on each side of the mug rug separately!

I did my binding using just cut fabric strips, folded and ironed, as mentioned in the tutorial, and was pleased with how easy it was!

Here's the two long sides done (back view)

Then the smaller sides were done last - and the corners simply folded over to neaten!

I really liked this way of binding.  Mine came out reasonably neat..

But not perfect!! ooops!

So thanks to the Curious Quilter for this mug rug tutorial.  I've certainly learnt from it - and now have a cute new mug rug!! 

Time for a cup of tea I think....

Does anyone have any other mug rug tutorials to recommend?

I'm aiming to try one each week!