Heart-Shaped Potholders

 My plan for hand-made gifts (the next time we go to France--post Covid) is heart-shaped potholders. 

This one is a larger potholder, made for my Sweetie who cooks.  It was made with leftover recycled jeans from the Midnight Blues Backpack project, and a St Vinnie's shirt that didn't quite work for the lining for the backpack.

The hot contact side is quilted with multiple layers of batting for insulation and padding.  

Seems to work just fine.

The whole blooming set.

These were all started last fall when I was making kits for Quilt Camp with my friend Janna.  Most of the fabric came from my mom's stash.  Even the binding and batting was leftover in the scrap bin.  I don't think I bought anything new to make these.

I'm keeping this one.  ;-)

 

This is one of the videos I consulted to make these heart-shaped oven mitts.

This is by Shabby Fabrics who suggested using a layer cake (10-inch squares) with coordinating fabrics.  Her pattern is a little bigger to allow for turning.  The other patterns that use binding don't lose surface area that way:

I simplified things a bit in that I did NOT add binding to the flaps on the top layer. Instead, I folded the in half, added a layer of batting and top stitched along the edge of the fold.  Seemed like an innovation and simplification to me!

It was helpful to quilt the bottom layer with the 2-layers of batting BEFORE cutting out the hearts.  That stabilized everything.

I used scraps of Hobbs 80/20 Cotton Batting or Warm-and-Natural, because that's what I had on hand.   I tested these (3 layers batting plus 2 layers fabric) with a hot tea kettle and other hot items from the oven.  The verdict: 3 layers of cotton batting appears to be sufficient.   I did not use Insulbright as recommended in most of these videos.

For my test heart, I also quilted the middle layer, but that may not be necessary.  She doesn't take that step in the video, and it does help to differentiate the bottom layer from the middle layer.

I did not include the hanging loop on my test piece, because we keep out pot holders in a drawer next to the stove.  I will include the loop for the potholders to be gifted.

 

This is the first test heart I made.  Yes-- there were multiple prototypes.  This method requires bias binding.  I figured out pretty quick that I did not want to mess with that -- although I figured out that this creates a slightly larger heart.  The turned one is just a touch too small.    In clearing out my mom's sewing room, I found leftover binding in her scrap bins and will use that.  This binding from leftover quilts, and is NOT cut on the bias, hence the little bit of curl to it.  Bias binding would have more give to it.   This heart used Hobbs 80/20 batting.

Here are some other references:

Heart-Shaped Potholders - Craftsy Tutorial 

Heart Shaped Potholders - Martha Stewart

Colors of Scotland

I ordered this 3/2 cotton Sherwood Forest warp from Blazing Shuttles.  She's an amazing Dyer who's been at it since the 1970s, so she's honed her craft well.  Usually her stuff sells almost as soon as she posts it to her shop website (or in live classes).  This set stayed up on her website longer than usual ...  [I get why she doesn't put much in her shop -- The documentation to post a product takes a lot of time and effort.  I have seen photos of her at her live workshops with tables piled high with painted warps.  I suspect that is where she sells most of her wares.  And many weavers have multiples of her warps in their stash.]

Fairy Glen by Gerry MacDonald Artist [Photo from here.]

The colors kept haunting me -- There was something familiar about it, and then I realized it reminded me of Fairy Glen on The Isle of Skye when we visited in May a few years ago.  Yes-- much more red than I expected.  Kind of like this Sherwood Forest Warp!   You don't really think of the rust / red as part of the Scottish landscape, but there it is ...

This photo does not show the colors as I remember them that day.  I seem to have lost a bunch of my own pics from that era.  Alive only in my memory now.  ;-(

I wanted to get a Blazing Shuttles Warp in part to study it:

• How far apart are her color intervals?  
• How do they move across the warp?
• How do the colors transition?
• What should I use for a companion warp?
• What weaving pattern should I use to highlight the warp (not lose it).

 

True Colors

When I was trying to choose what colors of Perle Cotton would best match the vision in my head of the diamond twill I want to weave, I found myself really struggling with parsing out the true colors on multiple yarn shop websites.  Everyone photographed them a little differently, so it was impossible to tell what you'd get until it was delivered in real life.  And these cones are too heavy and expensive to mess with shipping back the wrong colors.  So it's important to get it right.

I finally decided to order the Perle Cotton sample cards From Yarn Barn of Kansas.  These handy little cards were a good investment in time, money, and heartache saved.   Even here, I had to wait for daylight to properly "read" the colors. 

Here are the color options from Yarn Barn of Kansas for 3/2 Perle Cotton.  These seem a little darker, more muted.

3/2 Color swatches from The Woolery.  They used a much brighter light to photograph these samples.  It has a much different feel than the ones from Yarn Barn higher up the page. Also the texture of the yarns (as if they were balled and not spooled) gives them a chaotic, wormy feel.

Now compare Sapphire Green (left/top) and Wintergreen (right/bottom) from the sample color blocks at Halcyon / Webs. 

From these samples on a computer screen, it looks like the Sap green is much too bright, and that what I'm going for is the wintergreen.

 

   

Here are the Sap Green and Wintergreen sample color blocks from Yarn Barn of Kansas.

Compared to the greens from Halcyon, the Sap Green is still brighter than I would have purchased, while the Wintergreen looks too dark from YBK.

What looked like the perfect green online was in real life too dark.  What I discarded online turned out to be the perfect green in real life!

If you think the greens were hard to parse on a computer screen from all these online shops, the blues were even more difficult.  I thought I wanted Navy, but in real life, that might as well have been black (which is good to know the next time black is out of stock). 

So what colors and I going to purchase for my diamond twill project? 

    

 Sapphire Green and Soldier Blue.

When I twisted the Dark Green and Soldier Blue together, they read as the same value -- Too close.  Some of the other blues were too bright.  So I had to up the brightness on the green to make the color mixing work as I envisioned.  There were several I thought would work.

Another surprise was the grays ...  For another weaving project, I wanted something that would shine like hematite.  By the vendor color charts, I thought charcoal or medium gray would work.  But when I got the real life color cards, I discovered Hummingbird is actually more of what I was looking for.

As a reminder, this is the diamond twill I want to weave with the green and blue.

I also ordered some wool ...  Part of this is an experiment to see how the different materials work "in formation" so to speak.  Will the cotton or the wool work better for a seat cushion?