Christmas Eve 2012

It was Christmas Eve and I had 21 people coming over for dinner  so of course I decided it was a good time to sew.

There was still cooking and wrapping and some decorating to do, plus arranging of tables and setting the places but I still decided I would sit down and sew.

I had fabric left over from the apron  I made for my daughter,  so I thought I would make her a couple of matching hotpads for Christmas.  I expected I could get them done in no time flat.  I had bought insulated thermal batting months ago that would be perfect for a hot pad.

I cut front and back fabrics, plus a layer of cotton batting and a layer of the thermal batting, stacked them up nice and neat and quilted with a diamond pattern.

This part really was quick and easy. 
The challenge was to add the binding. 
I knew that I would need bias binding to go around the curved corners so I checked the web for a tutorial on that and went about making my binding.

 

Creating the binding took longer than the cutting and quilting of the hotpad.

Surprisingly, machine sewing the binding around the curves wasn't as bad as I thought, although it did involve lots and lots of pins.

Being in a hurry, of course I screwed up the first time when I went to sew the beginning to the end of the binding.

Oops!

Ripped it out and reattached the beginning and the end correctly this time.

Now I didn't have much time to get that binding handsewn around to the backside, so I decided to experiment with machine sewing.

I did a stitch-in-the-ditch from the front side, but I wasn't too crazy about how the back looked.  (Sorry, didn't have time to take a picture.  Didn't want to anyway.)

I decided that a zig zag stitch would be a great decorative way to cover the offending stitches.

I was pleased with the result, and had nothing left to do but sew the binding on the second hot pad.  Unfortunately, I also had about nothing left on my spool of thread.

No time to get new thread, so my daughter got these for Christmas, with a promise to finish the binding ASAP.

It was fun to see her open up the box with these inside, and she and I both got a good laugh about my unfinished binding.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!  We had an adorable helper to assist with the unwrapping this year:

Yes, I am now one of "those people" who put clothing on their dogs.