Tips and Tutorials Tuesday Linky Party & The Save Your Selvages Oven Mitt Tutorial

Tips and Tutorials Tuesday!

My blogging partner Michelle has written up an easy tutorial for the cutest Cotton + Steel, Save Your Selvages Oven Mitt that you’ve ever seen!

If you would like to link up a Tip or Tutorial of your own, scroll to the bottom of this post, click on the linky button, and show us what you’ve got.

Here’s more from Michelle:

As you may have heard, QuiltCon just wrapped up in Austin and after the unpacking and quilter’s hangover, I finally had the chance to sit down and sew. I was one of the lucky early-arrivers at the show to receive a goody bag from Cotton + Steel full of selvages of all of their prints.

I was so happy to come home and dive into a simple project.  I thought I’d jazz up my kitchen. {I realized how boring and plain my house seemed compared to the wall-to-wall quilts at the show}.

Here’s a quick tutorial to make a Save-Your-Selvages Oven Mitt:

Materials:

Strips of selvage sewn together to create a rectangular piece of fabric (approximately 36″ x 15″)

1/2 yard of lining fabric (I used a plain white muslin)

A 2.5″ x WOF strip of binding fabric of your choice

1/2 yard Insul-Bright Needlepunched Insulated Lining

1 yard of batting

Step 1
Sew enough of your favorite selvages together, using 1/4″ seam allowance, until you have enough fabric to set 2 oven mitts next to one another (plus 1/2″ around all sides of the mitts). My rectangle of “selvage fabric” ended up being about 36″ x 15″. Press the seams in one direction.

(Hint: Use an oven mitt from your own kitchen for an easy template).

Step 2

– Make a 5 layer sandwich:

Layer 1 – your newly created Selvage Fabric, right side down on the table,
Layer 2 – Insul-Bright (sparkly side down)
Layers 3 & 4 – two layers of batting
Layer 5 – lining fabric, right side facing up.

Spray baste, pin baste or just go ahead and quilt the layers together however you’d like. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t baste at all.

Step 3

Now that you have a quilted sandwich, you will place the oven mitt that you stole from your own kitchen on top of your newly quilted selvage fabric, and trace two copies of it.

(note: the picture is an example, but yours should be quilted before you trace and cut….a lesson I learned the hard way on the first run!)

Make sure you trace it once with the thumb to the left and once with the thumb to the right, so you end up with mirror mitt images.

Cut approximately 1/2″ outside of your traced line carefully using a rotary cutter (you’ll need a fresh blade for this many layers). Go slow around the curves, and it’s do-able.

Step 4

Place the two cut-outs right sides together and sew from the bottom (below the thumb) to about 3 inches from the bottom of the other side. Back-stitch at the beginning and end.

It’s bulky, so just go slow. Use a walking foot and 1/4″ seam allowance.  Don’t use a wider seam allowance; it will be hard to turn it later (yes, I tried this because I thought it would be sturdier).

Step 5

Fold your 2.5″ strip of binding in half, length-wise, just as you would when making a quilt binding.  Press fold. With the wrong side of your oven mitt facing out, sew a strip of 2.5″ wide binding around the bottom and leave about 3″ of a tail and trim.

 

Step 6

To ease turning the mitt right side out, clip the fabric in the valley (between the thumb and and the hand) a few hairs away from to the seam. Be careful not to clip through your seam! Flip right side out. It’s easiest to start by smooshing in the thumb first (technical term), and then turning the main body of the mitt.

Step 7

Fold the binding to the front and blind stitch by hand or machine stitch 1/8″ from edge. Be careful not to stitch your mitt closed! I used sturdy, old-fashioned pins to hold the binding.  Clover clips would also be great.

 

Step 8

While your mitt is right side out, fold each raw edge of the excess 3 ” tail in 1/4″ and then fold the piece in half on itself, so its width matches that of the rest of the binding that’s already been sewn on (see the picture of the finished loop tucked in below). Sew the folded-in raw edges 1/8″ from the edge to finish.

Step 9

Flip the mitt back inside out. Tuck the finished tail into the inside of the mitt, and then bring the very end of the tail out towards the bottom of the side opening, as shown in the picture above.

Step 10

Sew the last 3″ of side closed (you’ll sew over the end of your tail).  Back-stitch at the beginning and end to secure it.

Flip it right side out again, et voila!

If you’d like to see another oven-mitt variation, check out this tutorial by our blogging, longarming friend Heather, from Quilts Actually. She approaches her oven-mitt slightly differently, and it’s fun to see the variety of ways a similar project can be handled.

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