DIY fall placemats

Good morning!

I’ve been absent from blogland for awhile now as I was having issues with WordPress.  Around the end of July, and out of the blue, it started shrinking my uploaded pictures – like thumbnail size shrinking.  Has anyone else had this problem?  Its finally fixed now – fingers crossed, and many thanks to Nick, IT and WordPress guru, for all his help.

Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well out there!  Today I am sharing some DIY fall chargers that I made recently.  I did them on a weekend when the smoke from the B.C. fires was really bad here in Calgary; the smoke and the unrelenting heat and the lack of rain has been almost unprecedented this summer.  Our average day time high this time of year is around 23 C.  It has been in the high 20’s, low 30’s since mid-June with no rain whatsoever.

Here is a picture looking out our front door.

And up the street.  Very smoky, and no sun out there, for sure.  I can’t even imagine what is has been like for our neighbors in B.C. – many have lost their homes and everything.  Horrible really.

In any event, it was a particularly smoky and smelly weekend and a good time to stay indoors if you didn’t have to go out.  Health recommendations were to avoid being outside if possible.  In light of the “recommended confinement”, it gave me an opportunity to work on some DIY fall chargers.  These chargers were prompted by some maple leaf placemats that Pier 1 had put out several years ago.  There is a pinterest link here showing the originals.

There are lots of different pinterest sites and videos on Youtube that describe how to make these and what to make them from.  I’ve seen them made from felt, cardboard, and posterboard, to name a few.  I originally was going to use some cardboard cake plates from Michaels, but they were only 12 inches in diameter and I wanted them a bit bigger.  In the end, I decided to use some gold plastic charger plates that I already had.

There was not much in terms of materials.  Here I have six gold charger plates, some leaves, and my glue gun.  I had also picked up some fabric glue from the dollar store just in case, but it turned out that the glue gun was all that was needed.

Here is a picture of just the leaves.  Its kind of dark in the kitchen with the windows and blinds all closed against the heat and smoke, but I chose four different colors for the chargers.  You could use any color(s) that you want.  I think they would also be really pretty with neutral colors like creams, tans, and browns, if you could find them…

The next step is to decide how you want the pattern to look.  I had to play with mine a bit; I originally thought that I would do the outside row in red and the inside row in green, but in the end, the all-green inside row was too much green when combined with the red.  I ended up with every second leaf being green on the inside row, alternating with a tan/pink leaf and an orange/green leaf.  Here is how I laid them out to begin with.

And here are the plates that I wanted to use with the chargers.

I started with the red leaves on the outside row.  I placed them so that the two sides/extensions of the leaf (not sure if this is the correct word) were just hanging over the edge of the charger, leaving the top of the leaf extending about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch (I didn’t measure) from the edge.  I used just a thin strip of glue at the base of the leaf following its outline at the bottom.  I overlapped subsequent leaves just a bit and continued on until I had done about 3/4 of the outside row.  Here I had to stop and experiment with how to place the remaining leaves (either slightly more or less spaced apart) so that there were no blank spots.

For the inside row, I started with a green leaf and placed it so the top of the leaf was even with the side of the red leaf.  Like this.

Here I folded back the green leaf so you can see the underlying red leaf.  I’m using the fabric glue to hold the leaf back just so I could photograph it.  Trust me when I say I’m not very good at taking cell shots with one hand lol…

Again with the inside row, I slightly overlapped each leaf.  And I stopped before I was all the way around so I could experiment with how to best space the remaining leaves.  I was working with 3 different colored leaves, but really, there is not a lot of difference in color between the tan/pink leaf and the orange/green leaf, so I wasn’t too concerned if they didn’t space out perfectly.  More important was that I wouldn’t end up with two green leaves side by side.

In retrospect, I guess I could have gone back and measured the circumference of the plate and calculated the number of leaves based on their greatest width around the circumference, but that just makes my head hurt.  My advice is don’t sweat it…

Here is one of the completed chargers.

Here is the charger with the plates on it.  You really can’t notice the slight differences in spacing, and you certainly wouldn’t notice when the entire table is set.  And if a little bit of the gold from the original charger peeks through, that’s okay too.  I’ll just accent the tablescape with gold…

The package of leaves I used came from Amazon.

I had no idea how many I would need to cover the chargers, but there were 1000 leaves altogether in this package I think with six or seven different colors and I believe the price was around $12.00.  That plus about 4 glue sticks was the cost to make the chargers.  If you had to buy the chargers, they come in a package of 6 for $10.00 at Michaels.  Probably even cheaper at the dollar store if your dollar store carries them….  I used around 35 leaves per charger and made six of them for my table setting.  The entire project took a couple of hours and I’d rate it as easy on the difficulty scale.  Guess I have some left over leaves lol…

Happy summer moving into fall everyone and I’d love to hear about it if anyone else makes these chargers!!  Sharing with Between Naps on the Porch.

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