Tutorial Tue: Disarmingly Charming Quilted Potholder

Tutorial: Quilted Potholder 

Have any of you decided to enter Moda Bake Shop's Contest? I have, but I don't want to reveal my entry just yet! But I did make a potholder with my leftover fabrics, and although there are about a million potholder tutorials online, I'm going to share this one anyway. It's for my little sister Serena, who's just moved to Alaska with her USAF husband, John. So it's sort of a housewarming gift set, as I'm sending her my matching Fandango (Kate Spain) quilted entry also.

What you'll need:

• 4 x strips of fabric, 10" by 2 1/2" for the front
• 9" by 9" square for back of quilted part             
• 12" by 9" piece of fabric for back grippy pocket - N.B. If you have fusible woven interfacing around, you should use it on the back of this piece to make it more sturdy and substantial. Trust me.
• 9" by 9" quilt batting
• 9" by 9" of Insul-brite batting
• enough 2" wide strips of fabric to make 38-40" of binding

From top left: strips for front, back piece, pocket piece, binding strips.

The Insul-Brite is on top - you can get it at fabric stores, where it lives with the quilt batting. I got 1/2 metre for like £2.50.

1. Make the front: Take your 2 1/2" strips of fabric and arrange them in a pleasing way, then sew together using 1/4" Seam Allowance (SA). Press all the SA  to one side.

2. Make the sandwich: Take your backing piece and lay it face down on the table. Cover with quilt batting, then cover that with your Insul-brite batting, with reflective side up. This ensures that the heat is reflected back to the pan or dish when you use the potholder - it's not going to do much good facing toward your hand! Then cover that with your pieced front, and baste in whatever way you usually baste stuff.  I used quilting adhesive spray on the batting layers because it's easy and effective and I'm lazy.

3. Quilt as desired:  Don't worry too much about getting the edges perfect because we'll be trimming this down to 8" square! 

I just did wiggly stipple quilting.

 4. Trim: Using your rotary cutter and ruler, trim the quilted piece to 8" square.

5. Attach the pocket: Take your pocket piece and fold it in half, WST, so that it measures 6" by 9". Carefully pin the edges down and trim so that it measures 6" by 8".  Now, edge stitch that folded edge to make it look all pretty and make it sturdy. Then attach the pocket to the potholder, edgestitching a few mms away from the edge, as pictured below:

6. Make your binding: If necessary, attach your binding strips together like this: 

I use Crazy Mom Quilts binding tutorial every time I need to bind a quilt, so I'll just recommend you go there. AmandaJean is a great teacher! But, in order to save time, I sewed mine onto the back of the potholder, and instead of hand sewing it, I used my machine because it's faster and again: I'm lazy.
So here's what mine looked like on the back before I sewed the front binding down:

See the pin peeking out on the top left?

And here's what it looked like on the front, all pinned and ready:

I stitched the binding down, close to the edge:

And here's the finished product! Such a quick, cute and easy thing to make!

If you look carefully you can see that I didn't do that great of a job with the front edgestitching, but that was totally my fault for pulling the binding around way too tightly, and it was a very useful lesson for me to have learned (the hard way, as usual!).

If you have any questions, email me at jennaexcell (at) gmail (dot) com.
I also want to remind you that you can still add links to Manic Monday until Thursday at Midnight:
Manic Monday Linky Party!


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