Mug Rug for my Main Man and Printable for my Peeps

Guess what I bought? Well, I will tell you. I bought a darning foot for Betty, my old White sewing machine. And with this magical little darning foot, guess what I can do? Mm hmm, I can free-motion quilt baby!

So to exercise those sad and atrophied free-motion muscles, I made this little mug rug for Lo. I figure he could use one for his desk at work. A mug rug is a large coaster for your mug or glass that has room for a snack on the side, and can be of any shape, colour or design you desire. Mug rugs are all the rage right now as far as I can tell, and there are some beautiful ones here if you have the urge to make one.

I created a freezer-paper stencil to embellish this manly mug rug. A thistle. My Lo likes thistles because, as I understand it, they are a manly kind of a flower. They are prickly and tough and you shouldn't mess with 'em. I chose one of Lo's old T-shirts to grace the front of the mug rug and stenciled my thistle onto it. I thought that if I used his old T-shirt, he may be able to tolerate his new mug rug. You never know... He may even grow to like it one day! Anything's possible.

Once the stencil was dry, I free-motion quilted little waves around the thistle with my new-fangled darning foot. Do you know that I paid a mere $10 for that genius little tool? Totally, totally worth it!

Now I'd created this gallant thistle stencil to use for Lo's mug rug but I thought: "What about all those other brave yet mug rug-less men out there? They could probably use a manly thistle mug rug too." So I decided to make a printable (my very first) design available to you. Here it is:

The Man Thistle Printable for your own personal use.

Please enjoy, and have yourself a wonderful Monday!

P.S. If ever you find that something I've written here needs clarification, or if you have a question, leave a comment with your email address and I will do my best to clarify.