Scrappy Saturday - Red

I am stealing a couple of ideas for this week. Cathy T had made these cute little hearts on her scrappy Saturday and is making a quilt out of them. I confess, I had hearts written down for one week and was thinking of using squares.....but could not picture it in my head on how it would work... until I saw these. The other 'steal' is from Ellen who mentioned she is doing place mats for her challenge and had a great one last week. I am combining these two ideas and came up with these pretty place mat tops.

Sorry it is on it's side.... I'm not sure why blogger keeps doing that to my pictures. These are just 3 red 2.5 inch squares and one white square sewn into a four patch. Then I cut two 3.5 inch squares for each heart and cut them in half on the diagonal and sewed them to the sides so they could be on point. It did take me a while to make these... about 2-3 hours but is was a nice relaxing afternoon without kids on a rainy day.
I hope to get them finished later today. We use place mats every day since I don't want to cover up my beautiful wood table and little kids do tend to make a mess. These will be just the thing and leaving them on the table will be an extra Valentines decoration in the dining room! Thanks ladies for the inspiration and great ideas. Go on over to SoScrappy's blog and see what others are doing on their scrappy Saturday.

Oh - while sewing these on Wednesday afternoon my machine was making some funny noises...... so I took out the bobbin case and this is what I pulled out of it.

Yuck. It is running a little better now but I think it is time to bring it for a cleaning.... it has been a couple of years since the last cleaning and I am not too good on clearing out the fuzz. So, when was the last time you cleaned out your machine, put on a new needle and changed the rotary cutting blade? I've done all three in the last week and boy, does it make a difference!
Happy Sewing everyone.