I'm slowly learning to quilt.
A few years ago I joined the St. George's Quilters, a group that meets at a local church to make quilts and donate them to local charitable organizations. The ladies there have taught me a lot. But I usually leave my quilting skills at the church, preferring to cross-stitch at home.
One of the ladies started to use up scraps left over from our large quilts to create small projects. She made some potholders similar to these, then donated them to the church on behalf of our group. They go in the new member baskets as a way to let new parishioners know about the Quilters and invite them to join our group.
Inspired by her work, I decided to look up the string-piecing technique on the Internet. I found some directions to make quilt squares, and adapted them into making potholders.
First, I went to a thrift shop and bought a few baby receiving blankets. Because they were used, the images on the blankets were faded and the edges frayed. But they are very soft and absorbent — and inexpensive! I think I bought them for $.25 each!
I cut the receiving blankets into 8 inch squares. Then I sewed two layers of blanket together to form half the padding for the inside of the potholders.
Next, I drew a diagonal line on one side of the padding from corner to corner. This is used as a guideline to help keep the fabric scraps fairly aligned.
Then, I started sewing the fabric scraps to the padding, following the instructions I found online. I did two of these pieced squares for each potholder — front and back.
I decided to keep both sides of the potholders similar by using the same color scraps in the same sequence, but it's not necessary. You can keep the colorization on your string-pieced potholders as stringent or as random as you desire. At this point, you can sew on a "Handmade by [name]" tag to one of the corners. It's a nice touch if you plan on giving these as gifts or selling them at a craft fair.
After the piecing was complete. I trimmed the potholders to 7-1/2" squares. Then I took the lid to a jar and placed it in the corners, tracing the curve. Then I cut my corners following the traced curve. I wanted to have curves at the corners instead of points because I find it easier to put bias tape around curves. That way I don't have to fuss with mitered corners.
Next, I sewed the two halves of my potholders together along the edges with a large basting stitch on the sewing machine. My potholders are now at least 6 layers thick — 4 layers of padding, two layers of pieced fabric, and extra thickness at the seams.
The last step was to sew on the bias strips. I had to do quite a bit of experimentation with this to get it to look OK. After several attempts, I settled on using 1" bias strips, double folded. I first unfolded one side of the bias strip and sewed it around the edge of the potholder with the raw edges of the bias and the potholder together, stitching on the bias strip's fold line. I clipped the corners to ease the curve. Then I folded the strip over the edge of the potholder (clipping the curves again), and top-stitched the second side of the bias strip to the pot holder, using the outside edge of the potholder as my guide to keep my stitching straight rather than the inside edge of the bias strip.
Actually, on my first potholder (the one with the pink bias tape) I hand-stitched the second edge of the bias strip using a blanket stitch. It shows up fairly well in this image. That looks nice, but just seemed to take a while and was too much work for a potholder. The gal from my quilt group stitches the second edge by hand using a blind stitch. On the second potholder I just stitched the second edge on the machine. It's a little uneven (first try, and all), but goes much more quickly.
I'm considering the idea of making a pile of these potholders to use as holiday gifts this year. I think if I get all my materials lined up ahead of time, and sew the pieces to the padding like an assembly line, these could be made up fairly quickly.