Cotton fabric, cotton batting, cotton thread, and nothing with a scrim in it. Jen Bosworth reads that list off the packaging before she cuts a thing, and the reason is that a bowl cozy is one of the few things a quilter makes that goes into a microwave. She talks you out of metallic thread on the same grounds, which is the kind of caution that only comes from having thought about it properly.
She is Jennifer Bosworth, and Shabby Fabrics is her shop. What makes this version worth the afternoon is that she does not start from a square. Five jelly roll strips get sewn into a set, and the bowl shape comes out of an acrylic template laid across the strips. The template is the one part she says is not optional. The precut batting that goes with it is, and she shows you exactly what you are in for if you cut your own instead.
The numbers are friendly. Five 2 1/2 inch strips sewn selvage to selvage give four cozy shapes if you cut carefully, and each cozy takes two of them, a front and a back. The precut batting arrives eight pieces to a pack, which is four cozies rather than eight. She quilts each half by stitching in the ditch down the strip seams, folds the notches in the template into darts, joins the two halves with a quarter inch seam, and topstitches at an eighth.
The video went up in August 2020 and has passed 364,000 views.
What earns it a place even for someone who has made a dozen is the honesty. She cut into her own acrylic template with a rotary cutter and says so on camera. She tries tracing the template onto batting, shows how badly the line takes, and gives up on it. And she hands over one thing the pattern does not say: press the strip set seams open, because you are going to turn that curve through a small gap later and every bit of bulk counts.
If you would rather not buy a template at all, there is another way in. One 10 inch square, four darts and a disc from the shelf to round the corners, written out in our bowl cozy pattern.
The rest of Jen's tutorials are on the Shabby Fabrics channel.
