While pot holders are relatively cheap to purchase, you can make much more interesting pot holders yourself.
It takes a bit of time and fabric. It is a good project for scraps. For this pot holder I did purchase fabric for the fussy cut center, but it could just as easily be a quilted center or even applique using scrap fabric.
Continue below the orange squiggle for the process, remembering that I am still somewhat new to quilting. My binding really didn't turn out well on all corners.
I started with a pattern I had purchased from epatternscentral.com from the American School of Needlework. The picture below is how this officially would have looked.
I did start to make the scappy applique but then found the fabric below and changed my mind.
Getting back to the beginning. Following the directions, I cut the inner rectangle in a yellow fabric and did the first sash in white with red flowers fabric. (Since the pattern is copyright, I won't give the exact measurements.) I added the second, wider, sash in green.
Here is where I started to differ a little. The pattern called for cutting the green sashing to have 45 degree angles to add the colored corner piece triangles. I did not cut the 45 degree angle and did squares instead of triangle that I folded over. I did this go to give stronger corners. The problem with this, as I discovered later, was definitely thicker corners which were a bit of a problem with the mitered corners.
At this point I found the Pears square that was not overlapped with anything else and fussy cut it out. I folded the edges under, lightly glued them with a water soluble glue (to hold it in place) and sewed it onto the yellow fabric.
I now did another deviation. They suggested one layer of batting and quilting. I felt for a hot pad I wanted 2 layers. So I added a layer of batting and one layer of white fabric. The sandwich is shown below.
I did my quilting with this "sandwich". Outlining the applique and stitching in the ditch around the white/red sashing and the green. I sewed down the corners with matching thread. I also used the small decorative quilting squiggle stitch in the wide yellow area.
Now I moved on to add the backing in green fabric that matched the wider sashing on the front along with a fairly dense layer of batting. This sandwich is below.
To attach this I just quilted around the middle of the yellow area, which further "pops" out the applique.
Now it was time to add the binding, which turned out to be more of a chore than I had guessed, largely because I had 2 layers of batting and 5 - 6 layers of fabric. I did the usual 1/4" binding. To do this I started with 2" crossgrain fabric to match the narrow sashing. Folded it in half and ironed it.
I laid open the strip and cut a 45 degree angle at one end and folded it back to make a pocket to slide the other end into when I got there. I sewed the binding on starting at the point of the 45 degree angle, raw edge matching the raw edge of the sandwich, 1/4" from the edge with the open binding for about 2". I stopped and folded the binding over and started sewing on the raw edges. I stopped 1/4" from the end and did the double fold to miter the corners. Below is a good video on how this is done.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Although there are a lot of good videos on this.
My mitered corners did not turn out well. The first two are all right, but the next two are not. I will probably tear out the top stitching and hand sew the binding on the back which will give me more control on the corners. It was a very thick sandwich to fold the corners over.
Every quilting project I do I learn more.
What are you quilting?
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