Ruffle Pocket Potholder

I made some of these potholders for my grandma for Christmas last year and in the mad holiday rush, didn’t have time to take pictures for the blog before I gave them to her! The Bills had a bye week this past weekend so I finally had some time to slow down + work on some stuff! On a side note, my Gold-Dipped Lamp was chosen along with 19 others by Better Homes + Gardens for a list of some awesome DIY Light Projects, see that here!

I had some fabric leftover from my tie-front apron and knew it would make a super cute potholder for the fall. The cool thing about these is that you can mix and match as many or as few different fabrics as you like and you can customize it any way you like. I think this makes an incredibly thoughtful hostess gift for Thanksgiving, bring it along with one of your favorite recipes handwritten on a recipe card! I got this tutorial from Nana Company and Amy does a fantastic job walking you through each step and helping to follow along with pics. I love how impressive these look when they’re done… this was also my first project where I made my own boas tape and I have been using the technique since!

I followed her tutorial exactly except for making the pocket a little shorter (1 inch) so that I could “quilt” the lines in the tree bark fabric:

I thought it was a cool way to quilt the potholder back and it looks pretty cool from the back view as well:

As I mentioned earlier, you can get the full step-by-step tutorial here. I’ll share some photos of mine along the way while I was making it along with some notes you might find helpful!

The first thing you do is make the front of your potholder which is the pocket. As I mentioned before, I made mine shorter so that I could showcase the quilting on the tree bark fabric. I just took an inch off height from the tutorial. It gets quilted + trimmed, you add a ruffle and then a strip on fabric for your bias tape. I like to add my label centered with a zig zag stitch in gold thread but that part is optional!

 Next, you quilt the back of your potholder. The tutorial suggests straight lines but I thought it would be fun to follow the design in the fabric. The two pieces get sewn together, a hanging loop gets added and the bias tape you make gets sewn to the front:

The bias tape gets flipped over to the back and sewn in place! Here’s a look at one of the ones I made for my grandma last year that I snapped on my iPhone: