Sew Pink 2025 - Scrappy Coaster

I'm honoured to once again join the ByAnnie team for SewPink.

In previous years, SewPink was an initiative and blog hop held only in October and focused solely on breast cancer awareness, with projects that either help people affected, or that are pink for this particular cancer. 

This year the team at ByAnnie decided to make it a year long campaign to highlight not only breast cancer, but different cancers each month. The blog hop is still happening in October, but it also highlights various cancers in addition to breast cancer.

I wanted to take my blog hop day to shine a light on childhood cancers, as that is one that has affected our extended family. Did you know that childhood cancer is actually the leading cause of death by disease in children, despite being relatively rare? Luckily, almost 84% of children in Canada survive a cancer diagnosis after five years, and according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, this survival rate is expected to improve with new and better treatments. In other countries, children aren't so lucky.

Still, childhood cancer has a profound impact not only on the patients, who are almost twice as likely to be under the age of 4 when they're diagnosed, but it also affects their entire extended families. Siblings might not be able to go to school at certain times of the year because they might pick up an infection and bring it home to their sick brother or sister, parents might have to give up their jobs or take an extended, unpaid leave in order to stay at the hospital with their sick child, extended family jump in to help out when the other parent has to go to work and someone needs to look after the siblings at home, etc...

So for this year's sewing project, I decided to make the Project Bags 2.0 from ByAnnie, using some of my orphan blocks. Since the colour for childhood cancer is yellow/gold, I'm using this Rays of Love sample block that's been waiting for a special moment.

Unfortunately, due to the ongoing strike at Canada Post, the pattern and all the supplies ByAnnie was kind enough to send to me to make this pattern, are currently stuck in limbo.

So, the project bags will be a future blog post, and instead, I'm including this quick and easy tutorial for a scrappy mug rug/coaster with a swirly quilting design.

I precut my scraps, and one of the boxes I have contain all manner of 6" long strips. I kept them for a very specific project that is now in its end phase, so I went digging through for some leftover yellow strips to turn into a set of fun coasters.

How to make the scrappy coasters

Materials needed to make 2 coasters:

• assorted 6" long strips of varying width. Mine were between 1.25" to 2.5" wide. They should make a roughly 13" long strip when sewn together
• (2) 6" x 6" squares of backing fabric
• (2) 6" x 6" squares of batting

Start by sewing all your strips together along their long sides into a long scrappy strip. Press your seams open or to one side, as you prefer.

Cut the scrappy strip into (2) 6" x 6" squares.

I ended up trimming mine down a little to about 5.75" x 5.75" because some of the edges didn't line up very nicely.

Place your scrappy square on top of the batting, right side up. Place the background fabric on top of the scrappy square, right side down.

Please ignore the clipped corners. I wasn't paying attention and sewed them together the wrong way around first, and didn't realize until I went to turn them out... so out came the seam ripper and I redid the photo and the sewing, but it already had clipped corners then.

Pin or clip the layers together if you like, then sew all around the edge of the square with a 1/4" seam allowance, leaving a 2" gap on one side. Backstitch at the beginning and end of the seam to reinforce it.

Trim off the corners, then turn the coaster right side out through the opening, so that the backing and the scrappy square come to the outside.

Use a blunt implement like a large knitting needle or a point turner to push all the corner out gently, then press with an iron and fold the seam allowance in at the gap.

Clip or pin the gap to keep everything in place and topstitch around the perimeter of the coaster about 1/8" from the edge.

For the quilted swirl, start by marking the center of the coaster. You can either fold the coaster in half in both directions, or place a ruler on both diagonals and mark a crease in the center with a Hera marker or your fingernail. 

Find a small round object you can use to make an imprint in the center to serve as your starting circle. I used the top of a hollow screwdriver (it holds different screw driver heads to switch out, multi-tool style) as it had a sharp enough edge to make a nice little crease in the coaster.

Install your walking foot if you prefer, or another open-toe foot, and set the stitch length slightly longer. Then start quilting on the circle you marked. Leave the thread tails long so you can knot and bury them when you're finished.

After getting halfway to three-quarters of the way around the little circle, start to move out in a spiral fashion. You don't want to meet the start of your quilting line, but rather start moving outward slowly so you can keep going around in one single spiral to the edge of the coaster and only have one thread to bury at the start, and one at the end. Decide how close together you want your spiral to be and keep that distance steady. You can use the edge of the foot as a guide, or add a little space between the foot and the previous line of stitches, that's entirely up to you. Just keep that distance steady the whole way around.

Once you get to the point where you would run off the edge of the coaster if you kept the same distance, just stitch up to the topstitching line, and follow it until your foot is at the right distance to the spiral again. Then continue following the spiral until the next edge where you need to follow the topstitching line. Continue around like this until you've stitched far enough into the corners for your liking. You may only follow the topstitching line once at each side, or a couple of times depending on your spiral.

Cut the threads leaving long tails, then knot and bury them on the back of the coaster.

And there you go, you have a scrappy, swirly coaster.

To read more about SewPink 2025, go to ByAnnie.com/SewPink

For more on childhood cancer and ways to help fun research, click here.