Making Scrappy Potholders

A while back, my friend Linda @flourishingpalms said she'd appreciate a tutorial for how I make potholders - specifically the layering sequence of fabric, batting, and Insulbrite. Knowing I could quite easily provide that, I put it on my 'to do' list for 2026. Finally, when I was in the mood for some scrappy free-sewing last week, I knew the time had come.

Not all potholders need to be scrappy, of course. Feel free to use orphan blocks, or make any pattern you wish for the front. For the purpose of this tutorial, I sewed scraps together with the goal of two 8" square-ish potholders. I stopped piecing when my slabs were 9"-10" square.

Of course, then I needed backings. I opted to use larger sized scraps this time, though sometimes I choose a stashed print so the pair has matching backs.

I like my potholders quilted, so here's where the layering comes in. I place the backing right-side down, then top it with a layer of Insulbrite.

Next comes a layer of cotton batting.

And finally, the pieced slab is placed on top, right-side up. I like to baste the layers with a shot of spray baste, but feel free to baste in whatever way you like. It won't take much, since the quilt sandwich is so small. 

Now quilt as desired. Here too, it won't take much. I often like straight lines or a grid, often following the lines of the piecing OR marked with a hera marker. Below are examples of the type of quilting I usually do, from a batch of scrappy potholders I made back in 2022.

And below is how I quilted this pair.

Though I've made potholders in a variety of shapes, these days I almost always trim them with the unique shape I saw Hannah Haberkern @verdigrissewing use several years ago. For my template, I drew an 8" square on copy paper, then rounded two opposite corners. The nice thing about making your slabs a little larger than needed is that you can choose the orientation later in the process - straight on or angled.

For this pair, I chose angled.

Once trimmed into a square, I use a marking pen to trace the rounded corners, and then cut along those lines with scissors. I just get a neater corner that way than with a rotary cutter.

Then it's time to bind! Though maybe not quite necessary, I like to use bias binding on these. About 42" of binding is plenty for each one. Though I often use 2" binding for hand-binding quilts, I like 2.25" wide for potholders, as I tend to sew it completely by machine. Machine sew onto the back, then fold over to the front. When machine-binding, I find frequent use of wonder clips to be a big help in keeping things in place.

So once they're bound, they're done! 

I hope you find this tutorial helpful! Let me know if there are any questions. And I sure hope you enjoy making some of your own. I find them a terrific way to use some scraps!

Strings

Well, I finally have my first quilt finish for the 100 Day Project/AKA 100 Days of Scraps. Meet Strings, a quilt whose front is made entirely of scrappy strings and other bits from the scrap basket.

Folks have asked, and no, I didn't use a fabric foundation. I just sewed a bunch of strips together, and then added corners. Or sometimes, I actually started with a corner, and added strings from there. I didn't worry too much about the size of each block. I just let the strings I chose to use together determine that.

What that means, is that sometimes I didn't gauge well, and bits I actually liked got trimmed off. Oh well.

Eventually, I had enough blocks to make a good-sized quilt (54" x 55"). You can see that there were places I had to add in pieced strips or much smaller blocks that I made specifically to fill a certain space.

I continued on to make a scrappy quilt back, though I did have to pull a few fabrics from stash to make blocks large enough. Other than that gray solid, all the fabrics I pulled were in pretty short supply, so it felt just fine using them up here.

I think I mentioned that I had a cold that really hung on, and by the time I was feeling up to quilting, I was also in the mood to get this one done. So I chose to quilt using a diagonal serpentine stitch about 1.5" apart. I marked every 3" with my hera marker and quilted those lines, then quilted between them all again by eye. I confess that quilting in that way was relaxing but quick - ie. barely over an hour. This time, for this quilt, it felt just fine.

The thread I used was an Aurifil 50wt variegated 4570 [Silver Fox]. I thought it suited this mostly gray quilt very nicely.

I had just enough of a gray print to make a binding, which I hand-finished. So even though I did end up using a few stash pulls for this quilt, the front is 100% scraps, and what I pulled was 95% used up in the back and binding, so that felt good. All in all, I'm happy with the finish, and plan to donate Strings to our guild's giving committee.

Hourglasses

For those who like progress photos - I being one of them - I have come to a tentative stopping point for making scrappy hourglass blocks. A longish-term project for my 100 Days of Scraps, there are now 60 blocks of various sizes - ranging from about 8" x 8" to 10" x 12".

Forty-nine of the 60 blocks I created are shown on the design wall, and I'm debating next steps. I could settle on one size to either trim blocks to or build them up to. OR I could leave the blocks in various sizes and fill in the gaps with either one solid fabric, solid scraps, or print scraps. So many options. I'm leaning in a particular direction but would love to hear what you'd do....

Brown Crush

Still plugging along with my 100 Day Project, aka 100 days of scraps, I dumped my scrap basket out and gathered all of my brown scraps and pieced them into a big ole slab.

Then I used my 12" Clammy ruler, and cut out circles, not quite sure what I was going to do with them.

After auditioning several solids (I was originally thinking blues), I settled on Kona Crush, the Kona Color of the Year, as the background fabric, and then played around with layouts. Here's the one I finally chose:

I'd purchased two yards of Crush when it was released, where normally, I just purchase fabrics in half- or one-yard increments. So having two yards on hand was fortuitous, considering I thought it went really great with the browns.

For the quilt back, I went with a pieced back, using both scraps and stash finds, amazed I had some multi-colored prints that were perfect with the Crush + brown mix.

For quilting, I used Aurifil Forty3, a 40wt 3ply thread, 2360 [Chocolate] with 40wt 2360 in the bobbin on all the brown fabrics, and 50wt 2230 [Medium Peony] on the Crush. Considering this was a scrappy quilt with no end purpose in mind, I decided to play a bit, and actually did free motion organic circles in the brown pieced circles, seven in each. I marked them with a chalk marker, using a water glass as a template, then just kind of went for it. Perfect it's not, but I love the look. 

In the background, I went back with my walking foot and did a combo of echoing the circles, and straight lines in all the Crush sections. After all that was done, I went back and used coordinating thread to stitch a simple outline in each of the 'corner' sections. Three quilting designs in one quilt? That may be a record for me. haha

And just for fun, I overlabeled this one - my personal labels from gutenTAGs; as well as other fun ones from SarahHEARTS.

So I really enjoyed this one, making up the design as I went, and trying a few things that weren't my norm. At 41" square, it was a perfect project during my focus on using up scraps.