Soft tile trivets inspired by Tile Quilt Revival

Tristan’s corner block from Birds in the Branches – this already laundered trivet shows how the raw edge appliqué softens when washed.

During our last series of Craft Camps here at C&T (whereby we take turns teaching and making wonderful things using new products and books, or playing with new twists on older titles) I taught a version of a soft trivet that won’t scratch or burn your table, using the fabulous designs in Tile Quilt Revival by Carol Gillham Jones & Bobbi Finley, and our fantastic Insul-Fleece^®.

We took over the conference room to make some resized Birds in the Branches and All in a Dream blocks from the book, making 8”, 10” and 12” squares, whichever each person wanted to do.

Instructions:

1.  Cut the tile designs to appliqué on the “grout” fabric, as shown in the book.

2.  Loosely pin each piece in place, leaving space between each piece so the grout shows through. You can see how the tiles with colored background grout really stand out. And the spacing can be determined by how large you want your block to be.

I also experimented with using an inch-sized snippet of double fusible interfacing to loosely hold the tile pieces in place, thus avoiding having pins to dodge when stitching/quilting the tiles down. That worked very well.

3.  Cut a backing piece 2” bigger all around (so 8” top would need 12” sq backing fabric, 12” top would use 16” backing, etc) and then position backing with right side down.

4.  On top of the backing, add a piece of cotton batting, the same size as the tile top, followed by square of Insul-fleece and another piece of batting, with the ready-to-stitch block on top, facing up.

5.  Stitch all layers at one time, so you’ll be doing the quilting and the raw-edge appliquéing of the pieces all at the same time.

6.  You will then be able to double-fold the backing fabric to the front, machine stitching it down to form your finished frame for the tile. After doing a few tiles. I found I liked the look of trimming the backing to ½”, after doing the quilting, and then folding and stitching it, raw-edge, as I had done when appliquéing the tile pieces.

These are such fun….bet you can’t make just one. Thanks Carol and Bobbi for the easy, delightful patterns.

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