Potholder Weekend

This weekend, I set out to find batting to use in potholders. One phone call to a local quilt shop and two Fabriclands later, I had one metre of Solari.

The first Fabricland visit was still a success. The yellow paisley was $3/m. The pattern isn't as pronounced as it appears in the photo.

There were also a few other finds, including the stars and they orange fabric used for the first potholder.

Returning tired, victorious from shopping, I set out to make my first potholder. It is made from another $3/metre Fabricland find. It is quilted at approximately 1 1/4" lines. The binding is the same fabric as the front, since I couldn't find a good coordinating fabric in my stash. It was my first experience with a mitred binding, well any binding really. There were definitely some lessons learned.

I found the photos on this site were a good illustration of how to do the binding. You won't see photos of the back because it looks pretty rough. In an effort to not slip stitch the whole edge, I decided to fold the back edge over and stitch-in-the-ditch on the front around the binding. The result was not very polished, not helped by the fact that I cut the binding fabric too short, but it certainly didn't take very long.

Potholder II fed my growing addition to paper piecing. Made from four fabrics from Connecting Threads and some black that I already had, the pattern is called TripleStar from Ulas Quiltpage.

The centre area is 5 1/2" square, and I added strips of the cream for a finished size of 9 1/2" square, which is a bit large. Here again, I used a mitred binding using the stitch-in-the-ditch approach. The back doesn't look that nice, but it's better than the first one.

I also stitched along the lines of the extra strips. The layers are in order backing, reflective batting, normal batting, top.