Two things came up recently, and I thought I would ask about both of them in the same post.
In another group that I read, rec.food.cooking, recently there was a discussion about pot holders, and somone mentioned making your own
For the material, you would have to buy something that does not melt, but other that that, any regular cotton fabric would do, I think. As for the thread, "special" thread is not needed ("special" is the word the OP used, he did not explain exactly how it was supposed to be special), do you?
Also, what is used as insulator: just regular cotton batting?, polyester batting?, some kind of special batting made out of some thing like fiberfill or down?. The patten I linked mentioned that you need both cotton and poly/mylar batting, but can you get away with using just one or the other. Many cooks get pots and pans out of the oven with just a folded towel, not using anything special like a potholder or oven mitt (there even is an urban myth going around that professional cooks do it this way, and that your'e just a piker if you use oven mitts anyway), so I was wondering if you could get away with just using regular washcloths (perhaps doubled) as the insulating material.
So I guess thegist of my question is that while most quilters probably have the materials, or at least most of the materials for making these, and they really do not look that hard to make, at least to me, would it be better for a non-sewer to just go to Bed, Bath and Beyond or TEPWFNBWAW and just buy one.
My second is about using the glue sticks instead of pins. For my last fe projects, a cooking apron (I haven't tried making the oven mitt) and the exercise mat I recently posted about I used the glue sticks instead of pins.
I think they have several advantages. In the long run, pins might be cheaper, and they might be more "green" because you use them over and over again, but the advantages of glue sticks are: Several times I have forgotten to remove the pin before sewing over the spot where it is, and most of the time nothing happens, but a few times, I hit it just right (or perhaps wrong) and broke the machine needle, but this does not happen with the glue, and sometimes the pin misses getting back in the pin cushion, and it is "lost" until I step on it and it stabs me in the foot, this does not happen with the glue sticks, and finally, I seem to lose a lot of them this way, or bend them and have to constanly replenish my supply of pins to my pin cushion from the little package that they come in at the store.
There are probably other as well, but I think those are the main 3. I was just wondering if anyone else has tried the glue sticks and what they think.
Brian Christiansen