Pot Holder Tutorial

I love my oven gloves, but sometimes they are a bit impractical when grabbing a hold of pots.

I previously made a friend a pot holder .. so here is the tutorial. Essentially it is a quilting block, layered with batting and a durable back.

Step 1: Feature Fabric

Fussy cut your feature image. Using your quilting ruler, allow enough 1/4 of an inch between your image and the outside of the 2.5 inch square.

Step 2: The first row of patching, 1 1/4 inch strips

I used a nice bold black border for my pot holder, but you could use whatever you like. I wanted a gap between my feature fabric and the outer border. I always cut my strips a slight bit larger than 2.5 inch and then press with an iron, and trim with a quilting ruler and rotary cutter afterwards to make sure that I have nice and clean sewing lines for the next row of patchwork.

Of course if you are doing a number of these blocks it is quite easy to do them in a batch.

Step 3: Press and trim

Once your first row of patching is finished, make sure you press and trim. The middle square should be 2 x 2 inches and the outside strips should be 1 inch in width. So all up 4 inches square. Use your quilting ruler to square up your creation before the next round.

Step 4: The next row of patching

Using your 2.5 inch strip, repeat the process. Please remember to press, measure and trim after each stage.

Step 5: Batting

I used double layer cotton batting, anything that prevents you burning yourself. If you have some old tea towels you could cut them up and use them if you wanted to. I used double sided fusable interfacing in between the fabric and batting to keep them in place before I quilted them. Of course you could use safety pins, but I was feeling a little lazy at this stage ...

You could hunt up some heat resistant batting if you wanted to, but because these were not oven mits, just pot holders, I decided to go with normal batting.

Step 6: Quilting
Grab your walking foot, ladies and gentlemen. I prefer a longer stitch length and thicker thread to add texture. The outside quilting lines are there purely to make attachment of bias easier. But if you are experienced and happy to play with pins then don't run these lines.

Step 7: Bias and hanging Loop

For my holder I used pre-cut polycotton 25mm thick bias. You can if you want round the corners to make the attachment process a little easier.

As for attaching the loop, you can either
a) put the loop in first and then bias around,
b) add the loop in half way through the bias process, or
c) do it at the start of the process.

I don't have a fool proof way of doing this, so I will leave it to you to experiment.

As with most bias, sew it on flip it over, press and then do your top stitch.
If you make a pot holder with this tutorial, please let me know so that I can link to your blog entry.

I hope that a few of you found this useful!
Please let me know!