Only the most basic of beginner sewing skills are needed to stitch up a pair of custom oven mitts. No need to choose between kitschy prints and dull solids. Match the fabric of your oven mitts to anything you love — your Grateful Dead BBQ apron — your William Morris coordinates — Granny’s Irish lace curtains — the choice is yours!
Free Oven Mitt Sewing Pattern(s)
When I was a very little girl, my mother had a fingertip mitt that was made like the head of a bird (grab the pot handle in the bird’s open mouth) — I wore it right out, playing with it like a puppet. So there’s an idea, if you’re looking for something a bit different to sell for a charity bazaar or such. For myself, klutzy as I’ve been known to be, I prefer the full-size oven mitts.
A good starting point is Savvy Seams’ old free oven mitt pattern (now in the web archive) for either full-sized conventional oven mitts or the little fingertip pot-grabber style. And if that isn’t doing it for you, there’s another free oven mitt pattern over at BurdaStyle.com.
But I digress….
Heat-Proof Padding — This is important!!
Here’s the big thing about sewing your own oven mitts — you really can’t just stuff them with ordinary quilt batting or bits of old blanket. Never mind what you read on the intertubes on some of the pattern sites and blogs, skimping on the proper heat-resistant material for the middle layer is a great way to get yourself a bad burn, or to start a kitchen bonfire!
For safety’s sake, then, please do ask at your local fabric shop for a proper insulating material like Insul~Bright, which you can also pick up at Amazon or other online shops, if it’s not available in your neck of the woods.
Insul~Bright is washable, and the mylar woven through the polyester fibres will reflect heat away from your hand. Which is, after all, the whole point of sewing up a pair of oven mitts in the first place — besides getting your kitchen accessories all matching and onen-of-a-kind, of course. True? :)
Hi Becca. The layer of heat-reflecting poly-mylar batting, Insul~Bright, would go on the inside.
Basically, you’ve got four layers – the fabric that will show on the outside of the mitts, the insulating layer, a layer of cotton batting, and then the lining material – in that order.
See, that puts the reflective layer just on the inside of the pretty fabric, so it’s out of sight but still close to the hot surface you’ll be touching with the oven mitt. Then there’s still a layer of cotton batting and the lining fabric between there and your skin: as good as anything you’d buy in a high-end kitchen shop.
Hope that’s clear!
Jen
Does the insulating material go inside the mitt or on the outside?