Bowl Cozy
Another scalding week. Speaking of hot, bowls can get painful to hold right after being filled with newly made soup or when taken out of the microwave. So, I’ve made a bowl cozy to counter that!
I followed this video tutorial by Teresa DownUnder on Youtube.
I like the square shape of this one because the corners make it easy to grab and pull/move a bowl around quietly without the need to pick it up.
The finished cozy measures at ~7 in x ~7 in. I used four ~4.75″ x ~4.75″ quilted squares for the top piece and six 2.5 in x 5 in solid coloured strips for the bottom piece. Both top and bottom were then trimmed to match in size. My darts were 1 in (un-folded) x 2 in. The seam allowance was 0.25 in.
The top and bottom were attached to their corresponding pieces of lining as shown in the tutorial video. I worked on the top first, and I feel I did a better job with the bottom, particularly with aligning the quilt pieces and sewing in a straight line from corner to corner.
Top: I forgot to stitch in the ditch (i.e. sew along the patchwork seam lines) ; I didn’t see that I had missed it seam because I sewed the top with its lining side facing up 🙁 At least it’s colourful.
Bottom: Better diagonal lines that meet in the middle. I should have been more careful when pinching my darts together, since one of them got sewn in unevenly.
I’m *still* trying to use up a bunch of quilting scraps that I have left over. I pieced together bits of white cotton strips for the inner lining for the top side (pictured below) and used cotton-polyester blend batting for the bottom (not shown). The batting provides some sturdiness and prevents the cozy from getting too flimsy.
These loosely-placed white cotton strips that make up the inner lining piece for the top were not quilted together edge-to-edge. The three long lines I stitched diagonally and across the overall square kept them in place, albeit a little flappily-so. This is when I missed my stitch alignment with the “ditch” on the other side. Next time I try to make a scrappy lining piece to go with a quilted top, it would probably be better to sew the pieces together first at least with a tiny seam allowance or use place my pins more strategically. This way, I would be able to more easily stitch the top and lining squares together with the top facing up and avoid shifting and displaced corners underneath.
While I would have needed to use all-cotton batting instead of a cotton-polyester blend as the second piece of lining to make the cozy microwave-friendly, I don’t plan on microwaving my bowl together with this cozy. I’m just going to use it for carrying my bowl around and as a bowl-coaster!