- Potholder play: What it became

Mo asked some leading questions about Saturday's post, which led me to conclude I wasn't done with Trial 1. In truth, the potholder was too thin to deflect heat, too small to be doubled up, and too gnarly around the edges, where the purple-y grey wool looked ghastly next to the orange linen. Not to mention that it shrank unevenly during laundering, making the whole thing a bit too skewed for my taste.

So I trimmed the potholder down as much as I could without cutting into the edge stitching. Then I tore into another piece of rust-dyed muslin, basted on two layers of harem cloth, and began to attach it to the linen side of the potholder  ..

Lest this seem an inordinate amount of attention to bestow upon a humble potholder, I would note that it is hopefully a record of process that will help me avoid similar mis-steps in the future. Well, some of them anyway.

After securing the rust-dyed cloth in the middle, I turned the edges and hemmed the new B-side (note that the piece is still a bit out of kilter, even after the edge trimming) ...

then finished it with kantha around the perimeter of the A-side ...

Even with eight layers, it's still too thin and too stiff to be a proper potholder, so it's being repurposed as a cloth version of a trivet for the dining room table (put in the Table Series in August 2015).

Oh, and did I mention that the rusted cloth was taken from a cheese grater?

I think I feel a series coming on ...