Yeah, That Makes Sense...

What’s the first thing that you’d naturally want to do in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave?  I’m sure that your response matches dead on with mine – make heating pads, of course!  (Insert mammoth eye roll here)  I realize that this endeavor sounds insane, but it was a while back that I mentioned wanting to adapt this tutorial to use up some of my Posy charm pack winnings and I was itching for a small project with a quick finish.  This was just the ticket.

For my first heating pad, I stuck pretty much with the tutorial, but I upped the size a bit.  I cut my charm squares in half and sewed together three columns.  It actually turned out a little too big - if I had to do it over, I'd keep it to two columns and five rows of charm halves.

Then you iron that to your fusible fleece and quilt it.  I top stitched an eighth of an inch from all the seams.  And then you have completed the top of your heating pad - so easy!

It turned out that I still had a good amount of the solid pink Posy print from my Xs and Os project, so that was a perfect fit to make my envelope backing.  Don’t you love when sewendipity like that happens? 

But that only used up 6 charm squares…time for a little experimenting with half square triangles!  I used my favorite trick to quickly make a nice stack of HSTs and played around a bit with placement.  I know this probably isn't new to most of you, but it was a total revelation to me when I saw a YouTube video on it.

Simply take two squares of fabric and place them right-sides together.

Stitch a quarter inch seam all the way around the ENTIRE square.   (Sorry about this - if I had planned on doing a proper tutorial, I should have used dark thread so you could see it better)

Then cut with your rotary cutter from diagonal corner to diagonal corner.  Press open and voila – 4 HSTs instantly without distorting those bias edges!  Love it!

The second heating pad was a straight-up square of HSTs top-stitched again at an eighth of an inch around each of the triangles.  I had just enough of the pink Posy left to get one more set of backing from it.

The third which zipped together even quicker (since it was the smallest) was a Posy chevron.  I echoed the chevron on both sides of the seam for the top-stitching.

For this one’s backing, I just recently purchased a gorgeous low-volume aqua print by Dear Stella.  A perfect complement to the Posy prints!

For all three heating pads, my filler was plain old white rice but I added a few drops of lavender essential oil to a Ziploc bag, added 8 cups of rice, smooshed it around and then let it sit and get all yummy smelling for a couple hours.  Then I funneled it into each of my cloth inserts and my sewing corner was smelling awfully nice for a couple days.

And I still – STILL – have a big stack of charm squares.  I’m going to post some of these heating pads up on my Etsy shop if anyone else is interested in getting even more hot during this heat wave.  Might as well spread the insanity around a little bit.

Linking up:

Plum & June's Let's Get Acquainted Monday Link Up