The Kitchen Cooking Gift Pack

December 4th, 2007

The goal this week is to show the handmade gifts I’m giving out this year to my peeps. The first one up is a kitchen cooking gift pack that includes one of the wooden bead trivets, potholder, packet of seasoning to make Tandoori Chicken (amazingly good quick dinner for us) and our favorite dinner recipe cards.

To make the potholders, I used a contrasting fabric on the front and back along with some handmade bias tape.

The potholder is made by layering a 6″ square pieces of cotton, silver ironing board cover fabric, followed by two pieces of wool felt, ironing board cover fabric again and then a square of corresponding cotton fabric on the backside. And, if I used a white cotton I ironed on an interfacing to the backside so the silver-ness of the ironing board fabric underneath didn’t show through the fabric.

I then quilted the top layer (cotton top, ironing board fabric, wool felt) and then quilted the back layer.

For the quilting, I did a different design on each potholder just for kicks, this is the backside of the front of one in an easy pattern (cause you don’t have to pick up your needle) that looked cool. But on the others, I did a graph pattern and then a zig zag pattern and finally a chevron type pattern.

That looks like this on the front:

After I quilted both the front and the backside, I used my serger and serged the two pieces together before adding the bias binding.

To make the bias tape I used for the binding I used these handy dandy wonderful Clover bias tape makers you use with your iron that folds over the fabric as you pull it out of the contraption. I used the 18mm one.

Now I wanted a loop on the end and I found the most seamless way to do this was to start sewing down the bias in one corner but leave about a 4 inch tail off the end before you start sewing. This will become your loop in the end.

You sew the bias tape edging on around the potholder and fold over the end just beneath the tail in the corner you started at as show below.

You then hand sew the bias to the back like you would for any quilt binding. Afterwhich, I sewed the tail edges together (folding in the binding at the end so you it will be a finished edge). You know have one flat piece which you will loop back onto the backside and hand stitch down.

When you’ve hand sewn down the loop to the backside the completed loop looks like this on the front:

And like this on the backside:

As for the recipe cards, they are part of the Martha Stewart Crafts line and were on clearance at one time at Michaels so I snatched them up. I ran them through my printer with the recipes.

Here are more of the potholders:

That looks quite sweet all packaged up: 

Entry Filed under: sewing, holiday