Meet the insulated casserole carrier

I saw these handy casserole carriers at the War Eagle Mill fall craft show in Arkansas last year.  This project is so useful and simple — it takes more time picking out cute coordinating fabric than it does to sew it up.  They take maybe an hour to make, if that.

Until you decide to make it not simple.

Here is my first casserole carrier — it’s also the most popular when I show off my work.  I’m not quite sure why pictures of pears is so appealing, but it is.  The inside is yellow gingham.  Simple.  Ones like this one sell at craft shows for $20 or so.

I decided to make a few more of these, and somewhere along the line I decided since I was using a large denim piece, I should quilt my next project to make it extra cute.

This is where the K.I.S.S. rule comes in. What should have been an hour or work at the most , drug on for hours. Hours. And once you start, you’re committed to finish.  It’s a beauty, but with both Insulbright on the inside piece and quilt batting on the outside piece, there’s more cost in materials. The plus side is it’s super heavy duty.  I suppose if you really have a casserole you want to keep warm for a while, this ought to do it.  Oh, and did I say it took hours and hours to quilt?  And three bobbins of thread.  Either I need to get faster at quilting, quilt less, or maybe that’s just not a good idea for this simple project.

This is not how you make money at a craft show, I’m sure. In the end, the carrier still does what the others do, for more cost and way more labor, and probably wouldn’t command the a price equivalent to it’s worth. So, in the future, I will K.I.S.S.

Unless the end result is really cute.  Like quilted denim, which is really, really cute.  

Maybe a star pattern — six lines that intersect at the center — next time …

Update 9/1/17 – the star pattern: