Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

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  • Welcome to my blog!

    Hi! I'm Traci. I'm a Registered Nurse who loves quilting, knitting, cross stitch, and the great outdoors. In my pre-scrubs life, I owned Real Photography, and you can still see my old wedding and portrait photography site here .

    I've created a map that shows links to our camping/hiking/general family fun review posts that you can find here. It's pretty much the coolest thing on this site. Thanks, Google!

    I great big puffy heart *love* comments, so please let me know you visited! I try to always reply!

a hooty place : my first finished mug rug!

Remember this gorgeous stack of fabric?  Today it turned into this:

owl machine applique

And then this:

My first mug rug!  Mug rugs became uber-popular among flickr quilters this year–think of them as mini placemats or maxi coasters.  They are super fun to make because they are a mini quilt, so anything you’ve wanted to try out, can be tried out here with a minimum time/materials investment.  I tried out some wonky piecing on the back and love it!

(To me, the only problem with backs as cute as the front is that they look strange if the quilt/mug rug is quilted with anything other than all over stippling.  I wish I’d taken a picture of the back BEFORE I quilted it, because it was cuter that way!

A couple of action shots with a few of my favorite mugs:

Kona cotton solids: coffee, tangerine, lagoon, snow, papaya, and lime green.  Yellow polka dots are Robert Kaufman pimatex, green circles are Riley Blake cheery circles, and the green polka dots are Riley Blake as well.  Owls are Urban Zoology.

I am having a lot of fun practicing my free motion machine applique!

Mom - You put me in a very Hooty place! I hope this is my Christmas gift… ;P

These are wonderful! Love the splashes of color you added to Hooty! You are so artistic! And I continue to be super-jealous of your stipling!!!

Erica - Holy cow, that’s adorable!

Whitney - This is ABSOLUTELY adorable! I think I’m going to have to copy. 🙂

Susie - I love me some owls- way way cute, Traci! You’re giving me the itch to grab some fabric and get busy sewing, even though I don’t know how!

Jen - This is so cute! OK, so I’m just getting on board with these mug rugs. i love them they are so cute. i tried making one a couple days ago. Question for you..I see you mention above that you free motion appliqued the owl. it looks great! I’ve never really appliqued and I’m seeing all this great stuff on all these mug rugs. Are most of them free motion appliqued? I’m confused on your post because of the hoop. Do you hoop the fabric then applique it on your machine? See…told you I’m lost on the applique thing! The one i worked on a couple days ago, I just sandwiched the whole thing and then free motion appliqued through all 3 layers. But of course, now the back looks pretty crazy. i just didn’t know how else to do it! Guess that’s where the hoop comes in! Please inform me how to do this! Thanks!!

Fiona Leontis/Patchworkdelights - This is an adorable mug rug, very very cute!