Recycled Holiday Place Mats

I take pride in, and truly enjoy being frugal.  I don't claim to be such all the time, but when I see a good opportunity, I do give it a shot.  

 

Take the holidays for instance.  I love, LOVE to decorate but I also know how expensive it can get. Through the years, we've bought a few items here and there, but I've been very fortunate to have received a lot of cute and timeless decorations from my mother-in-law.  

 

Putting up the decorations around the house were easy.  But when it came to dressing up our formal dining table to make it ready for company, I realized I didn't have holiday-themed table cloths!  Yikes!  

 

What I knew I had somewhere in my attic was a 'Christmasy' vinyl tablecloth from about two years ago. However, when I spread it out to inspect it, I found it was no longer worthy of any public appearances.  It had spots or streaks where the colors had worn off.  Basically those were the edges where it got folded or draped along the table sides.  

 

See for yourselves....

 

I didn't want to give up and definitely felt there was something to be salvaged here.  So instead of opting for a full table cloth, I thought why not make place mats instead?!

 

So I spread out the entire tablecloth on to my floor, grabbed a pair of sharp scissors, a pen for marking, and an existing place mat which I used as a pattern.  I needed that to be precise with the size.

 

I was very lucky because I dealt with a checkered pattern.  This meant there were a lot of straight lines which made it easier for me to make the design pretty standard for each place mat.  But I'm sure the same concept is applicable to any design you might have with you.  I was also lucky that I had more than enough 'undamaged' areas to make six mats.  (I only needed six but let me assure you, I had a lot of left-over tablecloth in the attic for future trimming).

 

I was planning on busting out my hot glue gun and thick red ribbon so I could make the edges look more finished but I got lazy.  You can of course do that if you had more time and energy!  Hopefully by next December, I would have already finished that project!  But for now, I think they're good enough.  They don't look too bad, do they?