I love Flickr. Really, really love it.

I love looking at all of the lovely pictures and gain lots of inspiration and ideas from a good Flickr surf session.

I’d come across a half Dresden plate on a doll quilt and instantly fell in love with it. I don’t know exactly why it captured my attention, but I’ve been wanting to make one for ages… I just needed the right project.

Well I signed up to another mug rug swap (I’m hooked on swapping these goodies) and decided it was semi-Dresden plate time. This mug rug ended up larger than usual, but I figure that we never actually use our mug rugs for their intended purpose, so it wouldn’t really be an issue.

Here’s a quick little summary of how I made it.

Firstly I traced my wedge shapes onto my 8 chosen fabrics, cut them, stitched the wider edge and then pressed them to make the wedge shapes (message me know if you’d like more detail instructions on this process).

I then sewed all of the wedges together to form a semi circle shape (fan).

Next I layered my batting and white background fabric (Kona Cotton in White) and pinned my wedge fan. I’m a lazy pinner, so I used 4 pins in total.

I decided to use some invisible thread to attach the wedge fan. Regular sewing cotton in the bobbin and invisible thread through my needle. I decreased the tension on my machine as the bobbin thread was slightly thicker and I didn’t want it to be pulled up and appear in the front.

Stitch approximately 1/8” off the edge. Then stitch in the ditch between each wedge to hold them in place.

This is how the back of the batting looked once it was attached.

Now for the centre circle. As I was winging it, I tried for find a circular shape that would suit – and at CD was perfect.

I traced the shape onto the back of the fabric and cut (though a pinked edge would look pretty good too, I imagine).

I pinned the half circle and used a zig zag stitch to attach it onto the wedge fan (with the invisible thread still in the machine).

I added the backing fabric (in my case it was a left over block from a previous project). Pin and shadow quilt around the wedge edges.

Trim and attach my single fold binding (TUTORIAL HERE). And it’s complete!

By my calculations, it should be arriving in my partners mailbox today.