TGIFF is here!

Welcome to all those visiting from TGIFF Link-Up!

I'm excited to see everyone's hard work and be engaged in this quilty community. 

Since I did finish a top earlier this week for a QAL and just started a new quilt this week as well, I'll share a finish I hadn't shared before.

It's not a quilt, but a pot holder. 

But wait! Not just any pot holder...a folded star pot holder! That's right folks, this fabric was folded to make this star. 

Joking aside, I was eager to try this out and I even had some foody fabrics I had just picked up from a scrap sale that I got for nearly nothing.

You see that potato and carrot and lettuce and onion and red pepper fabrics? By the way, it's garlic on the binding. Yeah, it hurts my eyes a little too. Don't get me wrong, the fabrics are pretty cool. But it's too bad I didn't follow this tutorial here a little better. I had my own ideas. 

You see, I wanted to SEE that cool fabric, so I lengthened the width between the layers to say about a half inch, instead of the 1/4 inch in the instructions. Which wasn't BAD, but I get why the instructions say 1/4 inch. And since I can't see the fabrics too well anyway, it wouldn't have mattered and it would have looked cooler had I put them closer together and included more fabrics. 

That said, this is the most awesome pot holder/hot pad EVER. After I finished it, I was disappointed and thought to myself, "Why, this is quite a large pot holder...how awkward." It's about ten inches square, by the way. I LOVE it...but probably because I didn't realize how small my other store pot holders were!  This one folds perfectly in half (because of my quilting) either way for my hand around it and my fingers don't go off the edge.

I put the thick "top" with one layer of cotton batting and one layer of the thermal batting stuff called Insul-Bright with the fabric on the back. It's perfect and NO heat comes through. My other ones eventually get warm. I've tested it and stood holding hot things for a long time admiring the practicality of this dandy pot holder. I can't be the only one that loves it when you can make something better than you could have bought at the store.

 Also, I didn't find the pattern that hard, but I did have to take some time to figure stuff out and it took me just under two hours. But now that I've done it it would be much faster to repeat.

I'll definitely be making more of these....lots more of these. And pretty ones, too.

When that happens, this will be my "spaghetti" hot pad. You know, the one you use because you know it's going to get stained, again. Don't you have one of those?

Alright, on to the good stuff: Link up, follow, and comment away! :)