Cactus themed felt & fabric coasters

Although I love making felt coasters, this time I wanted to try something different: mix felt and fabric. 

Although I do like the result, they gave me a lot of trouble (making sure the circles were well centered, the stitches were even, etc...). Here's a small tutorial in case you want to make some too. 

To start you need squares of felt (mine were about 11x11 cm) and fabric circles that fit inside the squares. As I was using thin felt sheets, I used two squares of felt instead of just one (and also because I like the two-toned effect). 

On my first experiment I decided to embroider the fabric directly onto the felt, but it didn't work very well, so for the coasters pictured here I used two sided iron on thin interfacing to secure the fabric to the felt before sewing. 

I used a blanket stitch all around the fabric, and then glued the second square of felt at the back. 

And here they are - my first minimally successful attempt at mixing fabric and felt to make coasters. It's still not my favorite project ever,  but maybe a few of these using a holidays themed fabric would make a nice Christmas gift. What do you think?

Happy Thursday!