Crochet Project: Purple Place Mats

I had 2 skeins of pretty dark purple ("Portland Wine"), very thick Lion Brand Hometown USA yarn in my stash that were a birthday gift from my friend and fellow Crocheting Blind blogger, Kimberly. I loved the yarn, but I needed to come up with something small-ish I could make with it. I had been wanting to make myself a set of place mats for my table for quite a while, so recently I thought up an easy place mat design using just single crochets, half-double crochets and chain stitches with a size L crochet hook. I decided to make them with this thick yarn as it would be great to protect surfaces from hot plates/dishes.
My pattern was simple and quick to work up. I completed one place mat quickly a couple of weeks ago and loved it! Unfortunately, the other was not quite half-way finished when I ran out of yarn. My design took more yarn than I had expected in order to get the place mats big enough to be useful with my set of dishes. So I had to take a break on the project until I could buy another skein to finish the second one. I finally remembered to find another skein of this yarn when I made a trip to the store earlier this week, so I finished stitching up my other place mat this morning! (Don't look too closely at the photo though, they still need to be washed and blocked out).