Showing posts with label microwaveable fabric bowls. Show all posts

Thursday, April 06, 2023

Beautiful Ice on Free Motion Mavericks

Welcome to week 425 of Free Motion Mavericks. I've been mostly hiding in my books this past while, so I'll share with you some lovely pictures of our ice storm and my microwave fabric bowls or cozies.

All that glitters

I'm sure that everyone in the area is hoping that this is our last ice storm. It was beautiful from inside, until we lost power last night. Then it was just cold and miserable.

From my dining room window yesterday afternoon

The back tree glitters

Ice and fog!

We now have power and heating. Yeah!

Microwave fabric bowls

I did some quilting with my walking foot on the weekend. I made green microwave bowls as part of the 2023 Table Scraps Challenge with Joy 😊 You can visit the preceding post or use the link in Related links below.

Using my walking foot to quilt spirals in my bowls

A stack of microwave fabric bowls

What I learned

I'm in a low period in my quilting. I try to do something quilty or artsy every day, but mostly I want to hide in a good book! 🕮 I'm learning that this is ok. The quilting and stitching bug is never far away 😊

Free Motion Mavericks

We have a wide variety of link ups last week.

Raewyn at Stitching Farm Girl finished this lovely quilt with some FMQ for an upcoming Block of the Month. You'll want to check it out!

Raewyn's Block of the Month Quilt

This is Melva's 6th of 8 quilt for her client.

Another of Melva's finished quilts

LeeAnna of Not Afraid of Color made a lovely hanging for the 2023 Table Scraps Challenge. Have a look at her forest background and whimsical details 😊.

LeeAnna's whimsical wall hanging

On a different note, check out Denise's first block of her Crazy Quilt. What amazing embroidery and stitching!

The first Crazy Quilt block by Denise of the Quiltery

It's now your turn 😊

Monday, April 03, 2023

March Finishes and April OMG

When I looked at the Joyful Quilter's blog, I was thrilled to see that I had until April 4th to finish and post my ABC (Table) SCRAPS Challenge for March. The colour was green and the letters were B and/or U. I chose B for Microwave Fabric BOWLS.

Green Microwave Fabric Bowls

I made these a few years ago (I can't believe that it's been over 6 years ago!) and have always intended to make more since I have a few requests for them. So I'm happy to have done the March ABC (Table) SCRAPS Challenge and now have a few fabric bowls to give away.

Green Microwave Fabric Bowls

Since I don't like making something more than once, I decided to make these production style, otherwise after having made one, I would have called it done ✔

Fabric and batting all ready to start stitching

I marked all of the batting and then sewed the darts on each of them. The longest part was trimming the darts and then the batting, once the bowls were stitched inside out. I only forgot once to leave an opening to turn them right sides out! 😊

Once I made the first bowl, to make sure that it would work out, I finished making the bowls assembly-style. I even stitched the centre of the four larger bowls. Three of the bowls have a spiral shape in the middle. This large one got a house FMQ in the middle!

I FMQ the inside of this bowl in the shape of a house 😊

I'm trying to take better pictures of my pieces, so here are a few!

The tulips are about as open as they can be!

You can see the spiral in the centre of the light green bowl

A stack of microwave fabric bowls

April One Monthly Goal (OMG)

I worked on my Wild Hexies baby quilt this weekend. My OMG for the month of April is to finish this quilt. Here is the latest. It's very difficult to see, but I finished the bottom row of FMQ with waves, sailboats and fish. The FMQ designs are from Lori Kennedy.

FMQ the bottom row with waves, boats and fish

Sailboat on the waves

What I learned

The assembly line method worked well for making these 5 microwave bowls. If my fabric and batting hadn't been cut, I probably would have stopped at one or two!
The only thing that I did differently was to FMQ a spiral at the bottom of the larger bowls.
I made one 9" bowl, three 10" bowls and one 12" bowl. The last time I have made an 8" bowl, but it's rather tiny - I think that 9" will be a little more useful.
As I mentioned in my original post, I don't generally use the microwave bowls during the microwave process. I find that it changes the amount of time and temperature of what is being cooked. I tend to just use them as a pad to put the bowl into, once it comes out of the microwave.
These really wash well, so making a mess is not really a problem (except for the mess itself!).

Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Microwaveable Fabric Bowls

Microwaveable bowl to use at work

As summer flies by, I’ve been hiding from the heat as much as possible (that's estivation!). I still don't have my sewing machine back but I’ve done some work on a new quilt. It’s a surprise – so I’ll have to wait till it’s done to write a post. In the meantime, here’s an on-going project.

A few months ago I made some microwaveable hot pads or bowls. These are easy to stitch up, useful and make great gifts. My first fabric bowl was a tester. I used some funky fabric that I wouldn't care if it ended up being scrapped.

Largest fabric bowl

There are many tutorials online. I used the one by Kathy from Tamarack Shack. As Kathy advises, it’s imperative that you use cotton fabrics and batting. Anything metallic could create sparks!

Her instructions are for 8”, 10” and 12” bowls. This first bowl is the 12” version. It’s really big as you can see from the image with the bowl in it. That’s a large cereal bowl – my son’s favourite! I use both the bowl and the microwaveable bowl at work. It’s great for reheating my lunch and then taking it to the table or my desk.

The fabric bowls match the table runner

After the first experiment worked out, I made one of each size to go with the orange peel table runner I gave my friend Heidi. Aren’t they pretty all nestled together? They really went well with the runner.

Nestled fabric bowls for Heidi

I made a couple more for our kitchen, since the kids kept asking me when would we get some!

Smallest fabric bowl

perfect for single servings

I really like the small 8” version. It’s perfect for a single serving of something yummy.

Medium 10" bowl

The medium 10” microwaveable bowl pictured here is great to use with our soup bowls.

Great for dinner bowls

Large fabric bowl adapted for dinner bowls and serving dishes

I adapted the large 12” pattern to fit our dinner bowls as well as serving dishes by making the four darts a little shorter.

What I learned:

One word of caution - I think that the fabric bowl traps the heat from the microwave. Try warming something up for a little less time that you would normally. I've stopped using them under the bowl I use to make gravy (yup, my nasty secret is out!) because it always seems to overflow. That's also a good reason to use fabrics that hide minor spills. They do, however, wash up really well
These microwaveable fabric bowls are easy to make, but I'm not very good at making more than one of anything. I love learning new things but when it's no longer new, I get the "been there, done that" blues.
I did purchase some fun fabrics that will be perfect for more of these fabric bowls. Hopefully I'll get to them. They are great to make when you want a project where you don't want to have to think too much.
Is it really going to be an ongoing project? We'll see - there is no time limit to ongoing :-)