We have a debate in our household on what the item above is called. I call it a potholder. My middle schooler insists it is an oven mitt. I decided to let him win the debate and I will use oven mitt for this post.
As I have continued on my upcycling and mending journey, I continually see more potential of what can be fixed rather than thrown away. At one point, I had two pairs of matching oven mitts, but I must have thrown one away. The hanging loop on the remaining oven mitt came apart and we could no longer hang it. My spouse asked me if I could sew the loop back together. As I looked at the oven mitt, I thought to myself, this is really ratty. The outside edging was falling apart and, despite washing, the fabric was stained. However, the silicone pad and the batting were in decent shape. I could see that potholder had been sewn together and I had a heavy-duty needle in my sewing machine.
The first thing I did was to see if my needle and sewing machine could handle the silicone pad so I put the unthreaded needle through all the layers and it worked. The next thing I did was to use a seam ripper to remove the frayed (and greasy) bias tape from the edges.
I was able to locate some of the same size bias tape in the jumble stash and some quilting fabric from the 38-lb box that matched both the silicone and the bias tape. I cut the quilting fabric in the same size and shape as the existing fabric and attached a thinner light green bias tape along the top. I unfolded the dark green wider bias tape and then used wonder clips to attach the quilting fabric and bias tape to the cloth side of the oven mitt.
Because I wanted to avoid having melted thread, I used cotton, which conveniently was already in my machine from another project. I also attached my walking foot so I could effectively stitch through all the layers. I made one round of stitching, removing the clips as I went. I then trimmed the quilting fabric and then folded the bias tape to the front and topstitched the bias tape to the oven mitt. I then cut a strip from the quilting fabric for the loop. I folded it and stitched right sides together and then used a back and forth zig-zag stitch to attach it to the potholder. I attached it a little off center, but I decided to leave it as is since it did not make much of a functional difference to the potholder. Last, I hand stitched the quilting fabric to the existing oven mitt fabric using a whip stitch. And voila I have an oven mitt that works and looks better.
