Today’s craft project was potholders! I made one of these a few years back, just to see if it worked, and not only did it work, it lasted way longer than I expected! However, last night it got rather singed and the bias tape on it started cracking, so I decided to make a couple more today. Behold their majesty, before they inevitably get stained.

These are smaller than a lot of commercially-made potholders. I find those unwieldy to use. Also, they’re not quite as heat-safe. I’ve seen tutorials that recommend a special kind of insulated batting, but I’m just using leftovers here. I use a layer of thick quilt batting and whatever cotton fabric and bias tape are hanging around. (Basically everything is cosplay scraps. Batting is from Katamari, the turquoise bias tape was from Tsubasa, and the fabric… actually I think that was just old sheets that I kept around to do mock-ups.)

I cut out 5.5-inch squares of the batting and two pieces a big bigger of the cotton. I sewed around the edges to make what looked like a tiny pillow at this point. Then I sewed some lines in the center, like quilting, except I’ve never actually done that so I don’t know if that’s really what I was doing (but I tried to make one of the designs kind of interesting?). If there was any batting sticking out, I trimmed it off, then trimmed the cotton edges down to about 3/8-inch.

Then I put the bias tape on. You’ll notice in the photo I attempted to do one of them with nice mitered corners and stitch in the ditch or whatever, and then in the second one I just cut pieces and topstitched down. Both methods done imperfectly—they’re functional, not necessarily beautiful.) Squash them down a bit with an iron, and they’re done!

Just to reiterate: these are not super-heat resistant, so don’t use them with, like, cast iron. But they’ll work well enough for taking cookie sheets out of the oven, or taking from the microwave a piping hot bowl with soup in it that is hopefully also piping hot (but is often deceptively tepid).