Anatomy of a HotHolder

This entry will be a tour of sorts of my construction process when making HotHolders. But first, here are some cowboys and friends. My fav is the adorable little bull flying through the air in the upper left. He's being pursued by a fierce horse much bigger than him, but you can only see part of it's head underneath the loop. He has sweet long eyelashes. The three HH with white backgrounds are really nice vintage bark cloth. The colors are very rich.

This next picture is a HotHolder about to be swirled through the sewing machine. All those yellow balls on top are pin heads. I use quilting pins which are very long to get through all the layers. Between the top and bottom printed fabrics you can see 3 other layers: red sweatshirt, blue towel, buff sweatshirt. The top fabric is vintage bark cloth and the bottom is some high end hand block printed cotton from India. It might have been a tablecloth or big pillow cover.

Here are some all pinned together and hanging out near the sewing machine waiting to be quilted. The cup in the middle was given to me for my birthday when I was a little girl. I loved it! It has all these chaste flowery 1970s couples on it. Very romantic. Now I keep the quilting pins in it. I use the pencil to mark the spot where I'm going to start the starburst. When I wasn't doing this before, I tried to just identify with my eyes a spot that was in the center, and so many came out really lopsided!

Is it obvious what these are? Loops!

Another picture showing all the pins. This tour is not necessarily in chronological order, but I think I'm getting across the primary steps. Yeah? I think I'm at risk of giving away all my trade secrets here. I can't afford to copywrite my design so please don't go making a bunch of these yourself and selling them, okay? I'm a very nice person and you wouldn't want to do that to me. Besides, think of your karma.

Maybe this should have been the first picture. These are piles of fabric I've cut out and combined for HotHolders that I set out to sew for Boston's Bazaar Bizarre this weekend. In this picture I haven't layered in the filling yet. They are arranged in piles according to what color thread I will use. That's what those little slips of paper are on the piles - they have the colors written on them. I think I've managed to sew up about half of them since I took these pictures last week. Only two days left to prepare! That means I had better end this and start sewing!
Next entry will no doubt be about the BazBiz adventure. I'm very excited!

I have to go on about those 4-Way Entry Bags at some point, too. Until then...