Use What You Have

Mini oven/coal mitts

~ guernseyjane
Protect your hands when stoking the fire or picking up a hot pan – and use your scraps!

A ‘use what you have’ project as I couldn’t bear to throw out some wadding scraps when decluttering.

I made a rough pattern of an oval about 9 inches tall and 6 inches wide. (That is big enough to grab a small log or oven dish.) I cut out four ovals of fabric and one piece of wadding. Two ovals of fabric were cut in half widthways to make the pockets.

Each of the pairs of halves was pinned right sides facing and stitched along the straight edge to make two shapes like this…

Then the pieces were stacked in the following order : wadding, complete piece face up, pocket pieces face up, complete piece face down. Carefully pinned together I stitched around the edge leaving a big turning gap towards the bottom of the oval.

After turning right sides out, flip the pockets inside out and stitch closed the turning gap, then flip them back the right way and you are done.

Transparent gift bags

~ guernseyjane ~ Leave a comment

Use what you have for quick make bags…

I have a roll of book covering plastic doing nothing in my stash, so cut rectangles from it and headed to the sewing machine

I folded copy paper (yes I also have a lot of coloured copy paper to use up) over the short ends and stitched it in place with a long zig zag.

The covered ends were folded together and the open sides zig zagged together to make a bag. I even boxed the bottom of the bigger one shown but am not sure it was worth the effort.

Two tips: use an old blunt needle as the plastic will ruin a new needle and long stitch lengths will minimise problems with the plastic slipping.