How to Make a Quilted Potholder

[Music] hi it's sheri from occulting life and today i'm here to talk about my favorite patchwork pot holders and I've been making these for quite a while I don't ever buy pot holders at the store anymore and I thought it would be fun to show you step-by-step how I put these together and kind of the tips and tricks that I use when I'm making these cute potholders okay so these patchwork pot holders are just my favorite to make I really love doing the patchwork and they're perfect for using up your scraps and they're also perfect for using mini charm packs and actually two mini charm packs will make five pot holders of this of the smaller ones and for the smaller ones I use 16 squares that are two and a half inches and for the bigger ones I use 20 squares I just add an extra row so basically you're going to start by just picking out your squares and laying them out in a four by four grid and so I've got this one already sewn together to show you but I am gonna make some more pot holders with this fabric I haven't made any with these yet so I've got them sewn together and I will have a link to all of the information and I actually have a little PDF for this as well with all the measurements and everything that I will link to but basically you're going to make a four by four grid so a sixteen patch of two and a half inch squares and I just pressed like this and then you're gonna want just batting and this works out perfect cuz I had just gotten a quilt back from the quilter and I had extra batting and I just leave a little bit extra so this is about eight and a half by eight and a half and I cut my batting at ten inches by 10 inches and then this is insel bright and this is a heat resistant mentor that you want to put in your potholder and then I use another square of batting as well what I'm going to do is sandwich the insel bright in between the two batting pieces so these are all 10 inches by 10 inches now from everything I've read on the package instructions that Ansel bright does not have a right or a wrong side I mean it looks a little bit different but the package says that there's no right and wrong side that both sides give you the heat-resistant quality batting does have a right and a wrong side and but it doesn't matter for potholders it matters more if you're doing quilting but kind of the rougher side is the side that if you were doing a quilt that you would want towards your backing and the smoother side you would want towards the front of your quilt so I always layer it with a piece of batting my insel bright and another piece of batting and so that I have the the smoother sides of the batting out and I'm going to Center my potholder top right there okay so I've centered my the top of my pot holder on my little sandwich that I made with batting and sabra and batting and then for the backing the pot holder backing I make it a little bit bigger just because if I in the past when I've made it the same size as the batting and the insel bright I've had problems with things shifting so I do make this bigger this is 12 by 12 the backing okay so backing is going to go wrong side up and then we're going to put our little sandwich on top of it and so here I'm going to have plenty of space now when you quilt I actually did one of these with a walking foot and one of them without and I feel like the one that I did with a walking foot the smaller one really did turn out a lot better there are a few little puckers and this one I just wanted to try it out and see if I could keep those puckers without using the Walker walking foot but it's really hard so if you have a walking foot I really recommend it also I did a 3.0 stitch length on this one and I feel like it's too small I moved my stitch length up to 3.5 for the smaller potholder and I really like it a lot better it just gives more of a of a hand quilted look with that bigger stitch and it also looks better on the back the stitching with the 3.5 these are kind of small so I just feel like you get a more professional look with that bigger stitch length okay so once you have it like this you are going to do the quilting and I just did really simple quilting down each of the three vertical seam lines and each of the other across seam lines you could do even more and go on both sides of every seam line but I feel like there's not really a reason this gives you plenty of quilting you're just wanting to hold it together so once you've quilted it and it's going to look like this and I did use the walking foot on this one as well so it looks like this I've done my quilting you can see on the back that I also went around the outer edges of the potholder top so and now what I like to do is trim it and then we're going to round these corners I really like the rounded corners you don't have to round the corners if you don't want to you can just do a square potholder I just always think they look a little bit more professional with the rounded corners okay so I'm going to trim I'm just going to use an acrylic ruler from my rotary cutter and I'm going to trim off these sections sometimes it's a little bit thick going through all the layers but that that's another reason why it really helps to sew along the edges so that everything stays together okay and as I mentioned before you can leave in square if you're going to leave it square you can just go ahead and make your binding and finish it now but I like to just take that extra step that I mentioned of rounding the corners and I'll show you what I use I got these creative grids circle cutting circles a while ago and it has plastic circles in all different sizes and so I basically just use them for rounding corners on bags pot holders and so I'm just going to use the little smallest one it's a two and a half inch and I just kind of set it right up next to the edge and I just let it be my guide and I just round the corner and you can also use a large thread spool you could use a small glass bowl for this you could even make a template width template plastic but I really like having the edge to go up against and I feel like it just really really helps so then we've got the little the little trim pieces okay the next thing you're going to want to do is make your binding and what I did I used an 18 inch square of finding an 18 inch square of fabric to make my bias binding and I actually think I'm in a film a video on this and show you how to do that make that bias binding so that it's in a separate place some people can access it so I won't show you that now I will actually just put a link up to it but you're going to make your bias binding if you didn't round your corners you can use regular binding you don't have to worry about the bias but if you rounded the corners you're going to need the bias binding so that you can kind of stretch the corners that stretch the binding around the corners and I'll show you oh and here's my other one that I trimmed but this is after I've attached the binding and I did use bias binding I rounded these corners and I did use the bias binding and let me show you something that I do first this is a little trick I will take my iron and press the binding out with my iron so that I'm going to get a nice clean finish but then what I'm going to do before I start sewing it is I'm just going to kind of turn it and I can tell that it's going to be really easy for me to fold that over right there but in these corners it's kind of it's really hard and the reason for that is that we have so many layers we had the the potholder front we had the potholder back we had two layers of batting and one layer of insulate and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to trim some of that bulk from each of the corners so that when I go to sew it that it's not super bulky okay so I will get and you can do it with scissors you can do it with a rotary cutter but I usually just kind of fold the binding back a little and I just kind of trim just a little bit more of that off just to get that bulk out of there I'm actually going to get scissors I think it's a little bit easier to do with this scissors okay so it got my scissors it is it is easier and so I'm not cutting any of the binding at all I'm just cutting in the corner where we have all that extra batting and so you notice that after I do this that's going to be easy to fold that over and not have all that bulk so yeah so I just do that at the on the corners basically sometimes you need to do it it just depends kind of where how accurate your sewing has been I guess but sometimes you might need to do it on one of the sides but usually not usually just the four corners that you have to do that so once you've trimmed it there's actually one more step that you'll want to do before you finish your binding and that is if you want a little pot holder hanger on the back okay you can see that I've got these on both of my finished pot holders and I don't know if people really use these anymore it kind of makes the back look cuter I always put them on if I'm giving them as a gift because I just don't know if the person will want them or not so I figure if they don't want them they're really not in the way and they just lay flat and if they want to use them they can and so the way I make these is I take a two and a half inch by five inch rectangle and I will press it in half wrong sides together like this and then I'll press it in half again and then I'll fold it so then I have a thin rectangle like this and I just sew one seam right up that side where the folded edges meet and that's how I make my little potholder tabs and you can use this to make a tab to put on a bag this is I use the same size to make hangers when I make homemade stockings and so two and a half inches by five inch is the perfect size for a tab so if you're gonna add a tab make it and then you will just you know I use the seam and I Center it on the back and I did on this one just so a little basting strip to keep it there so that it's already been sewn on when you fold your binding to the back and when you fold the binding to the back you can hand stitch it down I use the clover wonder clips I'll grab some of those and show you how I get it all ready for stitching because I mentioned I really like to use the clover wonder clips I just used them to clip my binding down all around the pot holder now I like to hand stitch binding I know some people don't I just really like it and when I did these potholders the other night I just had them ready to go I watched the news and Stitch the binding down while I had the television on so but if you want to machine sew them you can as well and so in that case you would still want to clip it with clover wonder clips and then you can do a couple of different things you can sew from the backside and your you can kind of feel that if you sew right along the edge of the back it will end up in the border on the front so you're the stitching won't be out here if your measurements are off it can it can be a little bit tricky to get used to machine binding some people I just don't like it but I've gotten better at it with practice so pot holders are a good good way to practice machine binding but really these are so small and I don't mind sitting and stitching them we just finish clipping this and then I'll have this one ready to sew and you can tell that it was easy for me to go around all of the corners because we did trim and take out that extra batting and insel bright okay so I've got that one clipped it's ready to go and I'll have another pot holder as soon as I get that finished and I've got my little tab on the back so I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial for my patchwork pot holders today I really do enjoy making these I make them in Christmas fabrics at Christmastime and just in everyday fabrics I've made them in 4th of July fabrics you could do whatever you want they're super fun something else I do that I didn't mention earlier is that I just kind of when I have scraps I sometimes will just make the 16 patches or the 20 patch little pieces and just have them ready for to go and that way when they have you know four or five six of them I can just make that many pot holders at one time and I've already got the patchwork sections done so anyway I'll have all of the details linked in the description below that I mentioned out the video and please subscribe if you haven't already and thanks so much for stopping by [Music]

Channel: A Quilting Life

Views: 148,314

Rating: 4.9030528 out of 5

Keywords: A Quilting Life, Quilt Tutorial, Quilting, Sewing, Sherri McConnell, Moda Fabrics, Binding, Quilt Binding, Quilted Potholders, DIY Potholders, Patchwork

Id: DcX-tQhVtbU

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020