Potholder Tutorial

I decided a few weeks ago I had complained about fabric scraps for long enough, so I got to work. First, I ordered some Insul-Bright from Amazon.

Then, I practiced last weekend before the DnD game, and I made a mitten:

This turned out somewhat OK (you will be able to tell this hasn't been pressed at all though), so I decided to go a step further and make a trivet.

Here's a tutorial for how to make it!

Items needed:

1 x 25cm x 25cm rectangle of insulated batting
2 x 25cm x 25cm fabric; I used scraps I had left over
thread
pins
bias tape
a 5cm tape

Method:

Step 1: Sandwich the batting between the two fabric pieces

Step 2: Pin

Step 3: Quilt. Now, a note about quilting: I found it extremely difficult to quilt. The problem was that even with an even feed foot the bottom fabric would gather. I had to unpick a lot to get to something that looked ok, and the way I ultimately did it was by pulling very tightly on each side of the sewing foot. In any case, it's difficult. Maybe I'm missing something (any ideas?)

Step 4: Once you have quilted the whole square, cut the corners and make the whole thing a circle. Then, attach the ribbon:

Step 5: Then, attach the bias tape: open the bias tape, and attach it to one side. Then, turn it over and attach it to the other side as well.

You're done!

Comments

How to make silk bias binding

I promised this tutorial a while ago, but was too busy with work to get to it. This tutorial will focus on how to iron and fold the binding, rather than how to cut it. I have three links to good tutorials about how to do the correct cutting.

Here goes: a tutorial for properly making bias binding. Apologies for picture quality, I was using my phone.

Tools needed:
* silk square for the bias, sewing machine and scissors to make the continuous bias strip that will be ironed into place
* a 2-inch (5cm) wide piece of cardboard
* some sort of vaporiser, filled with water
* bias tape maker - for these pictures, I used a Clover which makes 1/2" binding (starts with 1" strips), but if I were to do this again, I'd use the one which makes a 1" binding (out of 2" strips)

Naming:
* left-side: bias strip not yet passed through the bias maker
* right-side: bias strip which has been folded by the bias maker

Steps:

1. Cut bias strips out of your silk square. I like this tutorial…

Pregnancy Pattern Round Up

Whilst I have been sewing these past 9 months, I haven't been posting much because in the past I was not massively keen on reading about people's pregnancy patterns. However, at some point I realized that I'm wrong and having some review out there would be useful, so decided to do a round up post about what I've learnt works and doesn't work in terms of this kind of sewing. This is a very long post :)

I had a fairly easy pregnancy, so I was perfectly positioned to have good results with sewing, which is great since maternity clothing is either decently priced and of bad quality, or expensive. Dime for dime, you get more out of non-maternity ready to wear.

Some lessons I learnt along the way:
Some non-pregnancy patterns will work for pregnancy. Sort of. As bump size increases, in the best case scenario you will get the mother of all pooling at the back, as if a gazillion-inch swayback is required (but isn't!). If that doesn't bother you, you're fine; otherw…

A new shirt

I made a white shirt. I cut this out sometime in late September, and I used McCalls 6035 again. I managed to finish it around Christmas. I wanted a nice white shirt, with a bit of a twist, so I added grey embelishments to it.

I am very pleased with how the embelishments turned out. I did a few things:
- embroidered the collar with French knots
- added grey/white twill tape to the sleeve seams
- used mother-of-pearl-with-grey-tint buttons

The effects are subtle, but they are there and I like them.

I embroidered the collar using two shades of grey, in a "burst" pattern. I tried to be relatively consistent about density of the French knots, but I think a bit of difference isn't very bad.

The collar was the first thing I finished, and it stayed there for a long time, until I found the time to get back to sewing.

I used a lot more interfacing on the collar than I normally do, and I think it shows. The buttons and tape on sleeves were added later and they're not very speci…

auxetically

Search This Blog