Making Multiple Coffee Cozies

Fabric cut, ready for stacking

     Recently I was asked to make 51 coffee cozies, well actually 52 but I got blood on one that I couldn't get out.  When I make these cozies I use a template from Winner Designs.  I love this template because it makes using the rotary cutter so easy to cut the patterns quickly.

Marking the corners for cutting

     The only drawback is that you can't see thru it so if you are trying to center a design when cutting you can't see where it is.  To solve this problem, I traced the pattern onto pattern tracing paper.  I then found the center and drew that vertical line.  Since my design had a flat horizontal line I drew another line perpendicular to the first to line up with the lettering.  I then traced a couple of other reference points so I could align my pattern on the printed fabric.

Detail of marking the corners for rotary cutting

     The first thing I did was to cut the printed fabric from Spoonflower into rectangles, roughly centering the design.  I then cut the Insul-Bright and lining fabric into rectangles.  I placed the see-thru template onto each of the printed pieces and on the wrong side marked the corners with a pen.  No need to use anything special as this was going to be cut off.

Template lined up, ready to rotary cut

     I then layered a piece of the Insul-Bright, a piece of the lining fabric and then the printed piece with the right sides of the fabric together.  I placed the Winner Design template on top, lining it up with the corner marks I had drawn.  Then it was easy to just cut all three at once with the rotary cutter.

     After I got them all cut, I marked where I wanted the elastics, then I pinned the elastics in place and pinned around the rest.  After I pinned a bunch, I would sew them, leaving on opening to turn them.  After all the sewing was done, I clipped the corners, turned them right side out and pressed them.  Then I top-stitched all around and that closed up the opening.  Last was the buttons, which I sewed on my machine.

     Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the finished product.  I did find it much easier to do each step on every one rather than doing one start to finish.