Cozy Cottage Mug Rug

The second block up in the Cozy Christmas Sew Along is a Gingerbread House. However, my house is more like a cozy cottage on a gingerbread background.  

If you are using the quick-fuse applique method (raw edge applique) you will need to patch the house.  To do this cut:

• one 5½” x 3” rectangle of roof fabric 
• one 5½” x 3½”rectangle of house fabric  
• one 5½” length of ½” ribbon or rick-rack

Place the house and roof rectangles right sides together, with the ribbon between the two - all top edges lining up.  Stitch through the three layers before pressing the roof rectangle away from the ribbon/house section.

Next you will need to trace B4 and B15 together as one piece onto the paper side of the fusible web and mark the roof-line on the house tracing.  Fuse this B4/B15 tracing to the WRONG side of the house patch matching the traced roof-line with the stitched seam.

The rest was pretty much exactly as per Lori's tutorial - I love that she tells you exactly where to place the pieces to the inch, as it makes life so much easier.

  

You will also need a 2" length of bias binding for the window box
(see last week's tips for a cheat for this).

To turn this sweet Cozy Cottage into a sweet little mug rug I added the Birdhouse Sidebars from my One Block Mug Rugs book to either side of the Cozy Cottage block. 

I added a redbreast to each of the little sidebar birds to turn them into Winter robins - sweet eh?   

Little Robin Redbreast

This is easy to do by drawing a redbreast onto the bird templates and using them as the templates. This would also work well on the slightly larger birds in my Summer Birdhouse mug rug pattern. 

I love the smoke spirals created using the template provided with the free Cozy Christmas Pattern (details here).

And there you have it – week two of the Cozy Christmas sew-along - one Cozy Cottage mug rug.

So until next week when it will be time to trim trees .....