Secret sewing

Mestizo is a great Mexican restaurant on Hampstead Road and on our first visit there with friends visiting from Glasgow I was really taken with the fabric tortilla warmers, and the great food of course!  Oliver's definitely the better of us at recreating the food so I thought I'd have a go at making some tortilla warmers. 

I got the Mexican fabric at a Vintage Kilo sale - it was a huge kaftan and cost me all of £5.  There's enough fabric left for at least one more, possibly two, tortilla warmers.  You can see my stitching is still pretty messy in places, although the pattern for this is pretty basic, boy is it fiddly! It's basically four circles of fabric with quilting in the middle and bias tape round the circumference.  I used this tutorial but I made the circles substantially smaller than it suggested.  I just found a saucepan lid that was a bit bigger than a tortilla and drew round that. 

This was a Birthday present for my brother - who's an amazing chef, in addition to being a wonderful brother and friend - and even though he's a fancy chef I know he still likes making fajitas on occasion so I thought he'd get use out of it!  It was only a week late for his birthday  - the result of very untidy sewing on my first attempt, I had to unstitch it all and sew it again.

Although I know it could have been tidier I'm still really happy with it.  I love the colours and it was nice to use some more fabric which came from my mum's house for the inner layer of the warmers (the beige fabric you can see in the top photo).  It was also just really nice to make something for someone else, to think about my brother and how much I love him, whilst sewing.  Although I think I'll need to improve my sewing skills some more before I sew for anyone outside my family!