My kitchen is full of motley and boring accessories: one burned oven mitt, two ugly matching potholders, black-and-white tea towels from Fortino's that don't absorb water so much as spread it around in a thin, even layer. I had aspired to replace them someday with colourful quilted items, maybe green ones or blue or orange, something cheerful. Then last week we went to a quilting store and I saw the William Morris fabrics and all was lost.
This is the damage so far:
Five potholders! Three tea towels with birds on them! The potholders are assembled from four-patch units made out of charm squares. I used the whole package (of 40); the potholders are pieced on both sides, so they don't really have fronts and backs. The tea towels are just rectangles with hems.
One oven mitt and one coordinating half-apron with a big contrasting ruffle at the front and big vintage buttons at either side! The oven mitt is from the template on this page; the half-apron is from 101 One Yard Wonders.
One knee-length apron with fun gathered detailing over the bust and rows of birds adorning top and bottom! The tutorial I used is here.
Not pictured: One tiny quilted cozy for my tiny French press, awaiting binding; six more tea-towel-sized rectangles cut out, pressed, awaiting hemming.
Guys, I have had to make myself knit this week. All I want to do is make another cup of coffee and hem more rectangles and sew more ruffled aprons. The palette is rather subdued and sedate compared to the cheery colours I had wanted, but somehow I don't care anymore. My priorities have clearly changed because look at the birds:
I wasn't a person who was terrifically interested in quilting before, though my grandmother's quilts were plenty inspiring and as a child I was sometimes deputized to press bits of fabric for her, or make yo-yos out of scraps. This, though, this is a lot of fun. I am having an inappropriate amount of fun.
4 comments:
Those are all adorable and so pretty! You're making me think about replacing my worn out kitchen things...
Do it! It is pretty nice to have pretty new coordinating kitchen things. I am a bit worried that having beautiful tea towels means that I will become the sort of person who irons their tea towels so that they can be shown off to maximum advantage. But this sounds like a fair tradeoff.
Did you use a wool batting to aid in insulation?
I used a layer of cotton batting together with a layer of Insul-Bright, and it seems to work like a charm.
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