How I made this: Quilted Potholder

I made a potholder recently, using Grace Rother’s quilted potholder tutorial as a guide (which you can buy for $5 from her, or get access to when you become a patron of hers!) and hot damn, it was both an extremely satisfying make and full of a-ha! moments for a novice sewist like me. 

I’ve made a quilted potholder before, but at the time I could not figure out how the heck you could make a quilt sandwich and not have to bind the edges. Grace’s tutorial cleared that right up (and a few other lingering things I hadn’t logic-ed out) for me. 

I made the patchwork portion of the quilt out of scraps of “cutter quilts” I’d bought off Etsy (don’t tell too many people about that search term, though, it can be our secret ;) ). I’ve been using these cutter quilt pieces to make tiny vests for no-baby-in-particular and more recently, for myself - I mean, how else are you supposed to layer all the puff sleeve things we all own after 2020 cottage-cored our lives?  

I took out the scraps of the quilt scraps, and since these are already quilts, I knew seaming them in the traditional way would be bulky af. I opted instead to zigzag stitch them together butt to butt - I’m sure that in time, these seams may unravel, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I continued in this way, zigzag stitching my pieces together until I had made a small quilt. For the batting, I cut a pocket off a dress I made from an offcut of wool blanket from the store I worked at in Tasmania in 2016-2017. I used a piece of linen - a lovely steely blue, that one Etsy seller has used to wrap up the cutter quilt pieces she sent to me, as the backing. It was a wonky, long strip, so I cut it in thirds and pieced it together to make a backing piece that was just large enough. 

I decided to quilt the layers together with little “x” stitches, using the red naturally dyed thread I bought in Guatemala in 2018 - there’s such an abundance of that stuff in the one skein I have, I sort of wonder if it’ll last my whole life :) 

I also added a loop for holding! (again, an a-ha! moment brought to you by Grace Rother). My instagram friend Hannah Taylor sent me the most beautiful parcel of scraps of her natural dye experiments, and there was just the thinnest strip of charmeuse silk (agh!), which I sewed into a tube and used a chopstick to force it to turn inside out (it’s the smallest tube I’ve ever successfully turned inside out, so I’m particularly pleased).