Next time you have a fish dinner, you may not even have to go fishing first. The meal is all served up on your new placemats.

I worked on these for many days, and when it was time to do the last step, I must have had that “horse to the barn” feeling and rushed through the corners when I was putting on the binding. Don’t look too closely. They are not neat and squared off.

BUT, I had a  lot of fun making up these placemats, cutting out the shapes and finding a fabric that would serve as a reasonably close match to their colours in real life – not that you’d ever encounter the Darth Vader fish in real life. Each piece is first ironed on with some slightly sticky white webby material called Steam-a-Seam. When you peel off the fusible material, you iron the shape onto the place where you want it to be and then sew around it with your choice of stitch. Mine was a blanket stitch that grabs the edges every second stitch.

I doodled around with my free-motion stitching (which just means you can go in any direction by moving the material around – not just forward and back when the machine does the steering) and was able to put some scales on some of the fish and lines on their fins, and make the pupils and irises of their eyes.

In the background, I see two strips of material from the Captain’s old jeans, one light and one dark, to make up part of the water, and a light blue denim shirt for the top layer of water.

In case you were wondering, I do know that an octopus has eight legs, but he’s sitting on one of them.

That strange creature reminded me of one of my favourite Ogden Nash poems:

Tell me, O Octopus, I begs,

Is those things arms, or is they legs?

I marvel at thee, Octopus;

If I were thou, I’d call me Us.

Now the placemats are all done, it’s time to use them when we set the table. I wonder who will get the first big blob of greasy gravy on them?

If it’s YOU, beware.

Darth Vader of the Sea is watching.