DIY Christmas Potholders make a great gift for the bakers in your life! Read through this step by step tutorial to learn how to sew a potholder with a pocket, and how to customize it with your Cricut machine!
Alright, guys, maybe Buddy the Elf disagrees with me, but I’m pretty sure that the best way to spread Christmas Cheer is by baking Christmas goodies. (I suppose singing loudly and sometimes off-key is to be encouraged during this activity though!)
But sometimes you just want to take Christmas cheer up a notch, am I right? So let’s get into the craft room and make some Christmas themed potholders to make your Christmas baking day even more festive!
If you would like to sew my Santa sack pattern, click on the picture below:
How to Make a Christmas Potholder
Potholder Supplies:
- Quilting cotton (about ⅓ yard)
- 100% cotton batting or insulated batting
- Coordinating thread
- Self-healing cutting mat
- Rotary Cutter
- Acrylic Ruler
- Pins or Sewing clips (optional)
- Sewing Machine
- Cricut or Silhouette cutting machine
- Iron-on (HTV) vinyl
- Cricut Weeding Tool
- Iron or Cricut Easy Press
- Ironing Board or Easy Press Mat
- Pressing cloth
- Download the SVG file free when you subscribe to our newsletter below:
This project naturally splits into two parts: sewing the potholder, and using the Cricut to customize it. If you want to just sew a potholder, you can stop there.
If you don’t have a sewing machine or you just want to do the Cricut part of the project, you can always buy a premade potholder and put the decal on that instead. I’ll walk you through both parts, so feel free to skip to the section that is relevant to you!
How to Sew a Potholder
The first thing you’ll need to do, as usual, is prewash your fabric.
If you’re going to be adding the vinyl decal with your Cricut, you’ll need to, at the very least, go over the fabric with an iron before you sew. If not, you might cause the fabric to shrink while you are pressing the vinyl on, and that will make your vinyl decal all wrinkly and might even distort it.
Then cut a three-inch strip of cotton that measures at least 50” long. You may need to cut two strips and sew them together.
Next, cut four rectangles out of your quilting cotton. Don’t worry too much about the size at this point. Just know that however big you want your potholder, you need to add a couple of inches in both directions.
You’ll be dividing these rectangles into sets of two. Both sets will need to end up the same width, but one should be a couple of inches shorter than the other. The taller set is for the main part of the potholder and the shorter set is for the pocket.
For each set, cut two pieces of batting about the same size.
Now you can start quilting.
There’s also no need to backstitch at the beginning or end riding this step.
Now repeat this process on the other set of rectangles.
Let’s attach the binding to the potholder.
How to Customize a Christmas Potholder with your Cricut
- You can use my free SVG file or use free images from Cricut Design Space. Use the search bar to search for the image you like.
Then click Make It!
Before you do anything else it’s very important you make sure your mat is set to cut on mirror mode. HTV vinyl works differently than the self-adhesive kind. If you forget to mirror the image, it’s going to come out backward.
Make sure your machine is on the vinyl setting and you’re good to go. Send it through the machine to cut. In the meantime, get your iron heating up.
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For more of my free patterns, click here.
For hundreds of free patterns and DIYs, visit allfreesewing.com.
I hope this tutorial inspired you to make your own DIY potholders for Christmas this year!
Beryl Haygood
Saturday 2nd of September 2023
Do we need the circuit machine? How do we make it with no circuit machine? I don't have circuit machine?