New and Improved

I finally finished my hot pad project- I got the templates here (It's called "Hot Seat"). Told you I want a red and aqua kitchen:

I liked the "dresden plate" look of the hot pad. The directions had me befuddled because they wanted you to attach the pieces to the center piece and then sew up the sides to form the ring...wha?

So I did as directed and got a mess- I wondered if that would work out since even their example (which should be perfect) had bad puckering problems:

It's just about impossible to construct it that way, especially since the pattern pieces don't have dots to line up. You either wind up sewing where you don't want or you wind up with a gap. I cut out the pieces pretty accurate, too.

So I ripped it all apart and sewed the ring as you would a dresden plate. I then assembled all my layers and sewed around the edge. They want you to leave open a space for turning, but I didn't have to do that since I still had the hole in the middle. I turned it through the hole in the middle, then stuck down the center using fusible web and then zigzagged around the edges. I also did topstitching around the edge.

I was pleased with how well my top stitching turned out since I wasn't using a walking foot (which feeds the layers more evenly). Mine turned out much better than the example, I was pretty pumped. It's fun to improve upon what others do.

I tried to have a blue center originally to conserve the red fabric, but it didn't look right. The red "pops" forward visually and the blue recedes, so it looked strange to have it "recede" in the middle. Color theory can be applied anywhere!