I Made Rainbow Fibonacci Placemats, Because It's My Pandemic Hobby

 

I've been obsessed with rainbows (it's like alphabetizing for colors!) and math (so many patterns, so many puzzles, so many correct answers that it's possible to suss out!) forever, and teaching myself how to make my niece's Sierpinski triangle quilt also got me obsessed with how satisfying it is to sew absolutely perfect seams and angles and iron them just so and end up with a creation that's gloriously precise.

Add in a nice long podcast, preferably in the true crime genre, and nowhere else to be and nothing else to do but sew and listen, and I'm as happy as a clam can be while remaining socially isolated and terrified of the ongoing global pandemic...

And we actually DID need placemats! I Googled around for a while trying to find a pattern I liked, but I don't like anything floral or cutesy or too curvy, I'm not in the mood for something novelty or pop culture, and the only color schemes I really like are galaxy and rainbow, because I am ten years old. I was about to just put the whole project on the back burner when I suddenly thought, "Ooh, I could sew the Fibonacci sequence just like I did when I made my Fibonacci quilt, and stop on a number that's the perfect size for a placemat!"

"Let's see... how many different squares would that give me.... OMG SEVEN?!?!?!?"

And the rainbow Fibonacci placemat is born!

Don't those squares, sewn so precisely and ironed nice and sharp, soothe that tense pit in the bottom of your stomach?

And don't you find that concentrating on cutting and pinning the layers together and matching everything up just perfectly requires so much focus that there's no room for any actual original thoughts in your head?

So pretty! So orderly!

And isn't it nice to quilt such nice, straight lines while listening to the behind-the-scenes story of the Chippendale dancers?

And doesn't it make your kid's ravioli soup, ripe peach, and half a homemade pumpkin chocolate chip cookie look elegant instead of the result of you 1) cleaning out the freezer and 2) foisting off the last of the canned goods you panic-bought almost exactly one year ago today because it was practically the only thing still on the shelves at THE HARDWARE STORE (stay classy, Midwest!)?

Also, both that placemat and table are kinda dirty. I'd warn you not to look too closely, but I suspect you already knew I'm not landing on the cover of Good Housekeeping anytime soon...

I'm so happy with how these placemats turned out!

I wanted to make more, but we don't actually *need* anymore (especially not if I'm going to make myself a whole other set out of rainbow prints, ahem...), so I made a rainbow Fibonacci placemat listing in my Pumpkin+Bear shop, because making them for other people is just as fun!

Anyway, I suppose that mathematical rainbow-themed quilting is as good of a pandemic hobby as anything else!

P.S. The Fibonacci Sequence makes a great homeschool math unit!