Quick and Easy Easter Mug Rug Tutorial

This is a quick and easy version of yesterday's tutorial for the Quilted Easter Mug Rug. It's a great alternative if you're not keen on quilting or don't want to have to deal with bias binding.

Just like yesterday, you will need an egg shaped template. Draw a rough egg shape to the size you want. I'm using half an A4 sheet of paper.

Create your egg shaped template

Cut the shape out to create your template.

Next you will need your top fabric. There are no rules here. One piece of pretty fabric or scraps pieced together, anything goes. Just make sure your fabric is larger than your egg shape. You will be needing to add seam allowance this time, so I recommend making the fabric at least 1'' larger all round. I also recommended adding a little iron-on interfacing to both the top and backing fabric to give your egg a little more stability.

For my top fabric, I decided to get fancy and follow the same concept I used in my I Cheat at Curves placemat tutorial. I had some curvy scraps left over so figured I might as well put them to good use. I even found a neat little trick in keeping the strips in place...interfacing.

***Psssst...If you already have your top fabric sorted, you can skip right past these steps***

Cut some iron-on interfacing roughly to the size required.

Lay out some iron-on interfacing (glue side up).

 Lay the first piece down, right side up. Don't iron yet though.

Lay down the first piece

 Lay the next piece down, right side up and overlapping the first piece by about 1/2''.

Overlap the next piece over the previous.

Continue in this fashion until you have the required size of fabric. Iron the fabric to the interfacing.

Iron the fabric to the interfacing.

This works wonders for keeping the fabric in place when sewing and removes the need for pin or glue basting.

Sew along each seam. Normally I would use a zig zag, but this time I played with some decorative stitches. I mean, it is for Easter after all.

Stitch each seam in place.

***If you already have your fabric, thus not using the above technique, then you can start the tutorial again here***

Place your egg template on your fabric. It's hard to see in this image, but I actually also have the backing fabric underneath so that I'm cutting them both to size at the same time.

Place the template on your top and backing fabric.

 Cut around your template, leaving about 1/2'' seam allowance.

Cut around your template. Remember to include the seam allowance.

Lay the top fabric and backing fabric on top of each other, with right sides together and raw edges aligned.

My backing fabric has interfacing to help give the egg some stability.

Layer the top and backing fabric.

Sew around the edge, using a 1/2'' seam allowance. Leave a gap to allow you to turn the egg right side out.

Sew around the egg, leaving a turning gap.

 Clip the curves, turn the egg right side out and press neatly.

Turn the egg right side out

Topstitch around the edge of the egg to close the gap and keep the seam neat. As you can see, I had some more fun with my decorative stitches.

Topstitch around the edge to close the gap.

If I were to make this again, I would add more curve to my curves as they came out looking a little straight. Still super cute though.

There you have it. A quick and easy Easter mug rug. How cool is that?

Remember to jump on over to The Sew Quilty Workshop and share your own creations.

An Eggcellent Quilted Mug Rug Tutorial

Who's up for a little Easter fun? This week I will release a few Easter themed mug rug and placemat tutorials. We will then have a casual little 'choose your own adventure' sew along in our Facebook group, The Sew Quilty Workshop, where you can each create your own Easter delight and show it off to the other members.

I will start with my favourite: A quilted Easter egg mug rug. If you're not interested in quilting then have no fear, I will have a non-quilted version of this later in the week.

First of all you need an egg. No, not the chocolate sort. Well...OK...maybe have a few of them on hand, but what I'm talking about is a template. This can be any size or shape you desire. I drew Mr Eggy on half an A4 sheet of paper. As you can see, it doesn't need to be perfect.

Don't be jealous of my mad egg drawing skills. We can't all be artists.

After drawing, cut Mr Eggy out and you have your template.

HINT: I invented some very colourful new swear words when applying the bias binding to the top of my egg, so, I recommend not making it quite as narrow and pointy as I have here. If I were to make another I would draw him a little fatter on top, so the curves would be wider and easier to bind.

Next you need some fabric slightly larger than Mr Eggy. You might use a single piece of fancy fabric, fussy-cut something cool, or just sew some scraps together as I have done here. The fabric only needs to be slightly larger than the Mr Eggy and will be trimmed to size after the quilting.

Cut or piece fabric slightly larger than Mr Eggy.

Make a quilt sandwich of backing fabric, batting and your front piece. Again, they all need to be slightly larger than Mr Eggy to account for any movement during quilting. I have used cotton batting.

Make a quilt sandwich of top fabric, batting and backing fabric.

Quilt away. I chose simply straight line quilting, but any design would work.

Trim you quilt sandwich to Mr Eggy's shape. I used my rotary cutter but it would probably have been easier to draw around the shape with a fabric pencil and cut it out with scissors.

Quilt and trim your egg to size.

Finally, bind the edge. You will need to use bias binding on account of the curves. I'll be honest here. I did find the binding a little fiddly, but that was because I made my top point too pointy.

I haven't included instructions for bias binding as Debra, from Stitching Rules, has already put together a fantastic tutorial here: How To Bind a Curve

An eggcellent mug rug indeed.

There you have it. Your quilted Easter egg mug rug is complete. The next tutorial will take you through how to make a similar egg, but without the quilting. Very easy and binding free!!! Plus, it's super cute.

Stay tuned for more and remember to jump on over to The Sew Quilty Workshop on Facebook and have a sticky beak at what everyone else is creating. You can also play along on Instagram with the hashtags #thesewquiltyworkshop and #eggcellentadventure.