Knocking Out the List

I've been finally knocking out my list, too bad it's not the list that's supposed to be done by Christmas. Oops!  Remember when I said the other day that I was going to start on stockings to attempt to get back into my sewing groove? Yeah, that didn't happen.

I made potholders instead. 

In my defense, these were on my list. This one in particular was on hubby's list. Remember when I made one for my mom? He requested one for us too. 

I bought some Insul-Bright but never did get to work on them. Then I used the Insul-Bright to make my table top ironing board, oops again. I ordered more during JoAnn's Cyber Weekend sale and it arrived over the weekend. Well, tired of having to hunt for a towel because our other potholders have fallen off the face of the earth, I finally set to work and knocked these out.

I made some basic square ones too, then forgot to add the loop to hang them. Oops for the third time.

I'll just buy a little grommet kit and add grommets to them. For now they're just hanging out in the pockets of the bigger one as it hangs on the wall. I may make a glove too, but the hubster doesn't like those so much so I might not bother if I'm the only one who will use it. 

I had a lot of fun finding fabrics that matched the colors in that Melody Miller print and really love how bright this is. I kind of wish I had bound them all in that teal color, but I didn't have it my stash and I wasn't going to buy some, it wasn't that big of a deal.

Today I started yet another project that's not on the Christmas list, but on the "I've been meaning to do for X amount of years" list. I'll share more of that one later. I wanted to share something that I discovered while working on it real quick though.

Have you ever attempted the continuous method of making bias binding? The kind where you mark the cutting lines on your fabric and then sew it into a tube and cut it apart with scissors? It's very tedious to say the least and I can NEVER get my cuts nice and straight with the scissors.

Well, tonight I was trying again. I was using the "turn a fat quarter into 5 yards of bias tape" tutorial, figured it was a small amount and I could cut that by hand. I put it all together, grabbed my scissors, cut about 6" and was already having trouble keeping it straight. 

Then I remembered my skinny little cutting mat. It's the first one I ever bought and measures about 6"x18". I slipped that sucker inside my fabric tube and grabbed the ruler and rotary cutter and got to work!

At first I just cut one piece of a strip at a time, rotating the fabric tube around the mat little by little.

It was working great! But man it was taking some time.

Then I got smart.

 I cut all of the strips that were on the mat all at the same time, then rotated the tube, cut all the strips again, so on and so forth until they were all done! I did have to be careful not the let the rotary cutter slip off of the little mat onto the big one or it would have possibly sliced through the fabric underneath. 

I will definitely be making more use of the continuous binding method in the future. This was way better than sewing together a ton of strips and better than having to cut a big tube into strips using scissors. 

Remember the Sew Mama Sew Giveaway is still on, tomorrow's the last day to enter!