DIY OVEN MITTS & TEA TOWELS

INSTRUCTIONS

Oven Mitts

Step 1 - Prepare your template. Place the scrap paper on a flat surface, place your hand with thumb spread out on the paper and loosely trace with a pen. It's important to leave a gap of around 2 inches/5cm all the way around your hand. The template needs to be nice and wide to make it easy to get your wrist inside the mitt.

Step 2 - Cut your fabric. To make 1 oven mitt, you need to cut two from the template from the main fabric, the lining fabric and the wadding (6 cut outs in total). The best way to do this is with the fabric folded over, so that you end up with a pair of each of the fabrics.

Step 3 - Sew the outer. With right sides together and the wadding on the outside of the fabric 'sandwich', sew the main fabric and lining together all the way around, being careful not to sew the wrist opening shut! Trim the excess seam allowance and turn the right side out - you should have the right side of the main fabric on the outside and the wadding on the inside.

Step 4 - Sew the lining. With right sides together, sew the lining together all the way around, being careful not to sew the wrist opening shut. Trim the excess seam allowance but leave it inside-out.

Step 5 - Assemble the mitt. The easiest way to put the main and lining together is to put your hand inside the lining piece of the mitt (remember, this is still wrong-side out, so you've put your hand in the 'right side' part of the lining) and then put your hand and lining inside the main glove. Wiggle your figures around and press the seams into all the nooks and crannies. You should now have the main fabric on the outside, the lining on the inside, and the wadding sandwiched between, with no exposed seams on the inside of the glove.

Step 6 - Sew the top. At this stage, I recommend basting all around the wrist opening to keep the three layers together. This will make it easier to attach the bias tape. After you have sewn the layers together, take the 25mm bias tape and fold it over the raw edges of the wrist opening, pinning as you go. You will be doing one line of stitching to secure the inside and outside of the bias tape, so be careful with your pinning to make sure you've captured all the layers. You can also use a piece of bias tape folded shortways as a loop - just wedge it between the bias tape and the outer layer, and you can sew it while you're sewing the bias tape on. Now it's all pinned, sew the bias tape all the way around the wrist opening, and voila, an oven mitt!

Tea Towels

Step 1 - Cutting the fabric. On average, a tea towel is 40cm x 60cm. However, for the sake of minimal wastage, I just took the remnant fabric from my oven mitts, cut it in half down the fold and squared the top and bottom. While this resulted in unusually sized tea towels, I preferred this to wasting fabric.

Step 2 - Pressing the hems/edges. For each tea towel piece, I folded a 1cm edge on all sides, pressed, and then did a double fold of 1cm, pressing and pinning. This results in a nice clean back to the tea towel, with no exposed raw edges.

Step 3 - Sewing the hems/edges. With the folded side up, edgestitch all around the edges of your team towel. I like to line up the edge of my sewing foot to the outer edge of the tea towel to get a consistent size all the way along. And it's that simple! You have a tea towel!