Bombazine Oven Mitt

Made up these oven mitts over a weekend, with the hand quilting being the bulk of the time. They were trickier than I anticipated, so much so that I wish I’d made myself a mitt or two to work out the kinks before making a gift set. Alas, as with many non garment projects, the time between having the idea and actually getting into making was long enough that no such thing was possible in the alotted time left to me.

The issues: hand quilting took quite awhile and to be honest I don’t have major concerns about the result, but I do worry a bit about the quilting getting caught on something in use. Hopefully it won’t prove to be a major problem.

I’d intended to use some cotton batting I had kicking around then realized that it was a blend (upon doing a just to be safe burn test) so ran out and picked up some Wrap n Zap, which I chose primarily because it was the most obvious 100% cotton option at Fabricland and I was rushing. If they’d had insulbrite I would have grabbed that I think. In any case, it wasn’t until all four outters were quilted that I thought to double check heat insulation, which I did by holding a quilted piece between my hand and the iron on a cotton setting (approximating a 400F pan). It heated up much too quickly, so I opted to quilt an additional layer of the Wrap n Zap to the cotton lining.

This did the trick in terms of giving appropriate oven safeness and I did try to be mindful of bulk in terms of cutting this next piece of batting within seam allowances, but it wasn’t perfect and two facing levels of batting makes for a lot of bulk regardless. I decided to not go with the EZ PZ Bombazine recommended route of leaving a hole for turning the mitt out in the lining because of all that bulk and inevitable friction, and chose to use a wide white bias tape to finish the bottoms instead, thus avoiding turning the whole piece.

I ended up doing the bias tape binding twice on each bottom and still did a bit of hand sewing to boot. This was mostly because I sewed the bias tape to the inside, then flipped it over, and again from the inside stitched it down. This left inevitable wobbles along the exterior, which because it’s a mitt, would just be way too obvious. The solution was to flip the mitt inside out (lol at me) and use the stitch in the ditch foot to keep me alighned. That worked 90% well except for some spots that just didn’t properly catch the outer fabric and needed a touch up.

Anyway, nothing too bad, but all could have been done a bit better with a bit of practice. As usual!

Pattern: Bombazine Mitt
Fabric and notions: cotton floral denim from Spoonflower, teak organic cotton wool denim from Blackbird, sashiko thread, shitty mercerized cotton thread (and my shitty i mostly mean old and thus weakened), scraps of Maiwa twill tape from an old dyestuff package for hangtags, wide white bias tape from a thrift store