Work In Progress: Hotpads



This week is my mom’s birthday, so today I’m working on a project for her.  A few days ago she saw a potholder I made while experimenting with and mentioned that she liked it.  



She’s been talking about doing some work on her kitchen cabinets lately and I asked her if she could use a new potholder.  She said she could.  She likes bright colors, like yellow and orange, and blue.  

Initially I saw a potholder on A Quilt is Nice that I thought was really cute.  There’s an easy tutorial for it too, on Freda’s Hive, but I have really been wanting to try Kaffe Fassett’s very simple “African Huts” from his book, Quilt Road.  So I made a block that I thought would be great.



Actually, I was so confident, I made two.  



But I think they’re pretty dark.  They don't sing "Happy House" to me.  I think I’m going to finish them up anyway.  I may like them more later.  I find that often happens if I just stick with it.  

Then I moved on to another idea.  I’ve had a book called Quilt Talk, which has a paper pieced alphabet I’ve wanted to try for awhile.  I ended up needing smaller letters, though, so I just drafted the letters to my size using the patterns.  







There was one other quilt in Quilt Road I thought would also make a great potholder called “A Cup of Tea for Kaffe”.  I chose to try it, but I just drew the pattern from the picture onto some graph paper, so mine looks a little bit wonky.  I found some Lite Steam-A-Seam 2, which I haven’t used in forever, and didn’t even know that I had, and used it for the applique pieces.  


So I have two, maybe three, potholders started for my mom.  I quilted them and rounded the edges, like in the tutorials, but haven’t yet added the binding.  That will have to wait until tonight.

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