Potholders--Sixth Finish for 3rd Quarter Finish-A-Long 2018

Packets ready for potholders

Returning to Oregon time from Hawaii time was more challenging than I had thought! To keep my mind off of the jet lag, I decided to pull out an old project--one that included a pattern and one that didn't involve much decision making!!

Goal number ten on my 3rd Quarter Finish-A-Long list was to make four potholders. Years ago, I boxed these fabric packets thinking that I make potholders and use some scraps. As a bonus, I'd have a few gifts on hand.

When my oldest daughter was in high school, she selected the fabrics and the block pattern. She wrote a legend for the fabric grouping and placed it in the plastic bag with the fabric. She was great about encouraging me to stitch up my scraps! I stitched about half a dozen and then forgot about the box. As you know from my last post, she has been married for 11 years so high school was years ago!

Gold and red fabric from the stash via Miss K.

Last quarter, I put the potholders on my list thinking that there was enough fabric for four potholders in one bag.  The bag I picked was for block 44.

I made one block and then decided that I needed to supplement the fabrics as there was plenty of backing and blue fabric; but, only enough red fabric for one pot holder.

Miss K helped me choose fabric for the next two pot holders. Then, she helped me sew the parts for the blocks. This was what her blocked looked like before she went home.

I sure liked her low volume fabric choices! I chose one fabric combination on my own. I stitched the block which was about 8 1/2 inches before quilting.

Next, I layered the backing, batting and block to quilt it. In the box, I had two layers of batting cut as well as one layer of heat resistant batting. I had enough of these units cut to stitch five pot holders!

Layered ready to quilt

As I quilted, I thought it might be fun to quilt each of the four pot holders differently. The first potholder, I heavily quilted. It is quilted so much that it is more of a hot pad than a potholder!

I discovered that I wasn't all that excited about using the focus fabric as the center pinwheel. The pinwheel print fabric is the fabric that I used for the backing and the binding for all of the potholders.

For the second potholder, I quilted in the ditch and then added a continuous curve in the pinwheel design. For the first and second pot holder, I free motion quilted the pieces. I wasn't that excited about the low volume fabrics in the second and third potholder.

For the third potholder, I got out the walking foot. After I had quilted a majority of the ditches, I quilted an overall design of straight lines. I really liked this approach.

Finished potholders

For the fourth potholder, I quilted only in the ditch. I liked the contrast of these fabrics the best. I might teach another machine quilting class and these potholders might come in handy as samples.

I hand stitched the binding and what you can't see is a loop so the potholder could be hung. While it didn't take long to stitch the blocks, it did take some time to get these to the finish. Still, I plan to keep stitching a few potholders each quarter until I have used all the packages of scraps!

There is enough backing and blue fabric remaining to make several more potholders!!!! This was a good project to work on while I recovered from "Hawaii" time!

I used a half yard of fabric. I have now used 22 1/2 yards from my stash and I have 27 1/2 yards to go to achieve my goal of a net loss of 50 yards from my stash this year.