The Creative Life: How-To Sew a Reversible Quilted Coffee Cuff

On my hunt for all things and people creative, artsy, and whimsical, I met Erin Teske, artist extraordinaire and fellow Cheesecake Factory lover. At some point in our cyber (and one real-life meeting), I discovered that she makes and sells Coffee Cuffs. I love these things! I keep mine in my purse, ready to whip out at any Starbucks. And I've gotten more compliments on it than the Queen of Sheba got in her heyday.

Erin agreed to share with us her secret of the Coffee Cuff.

Supplies:
Sewing machine that sews a straight stitch and a zig zag stitch
Medium loft polyester batting
Iron and ironing board
Thread
Fabric that you love (2 fat quarters, or scraps of fabric to make 1/8 yd. for front, 1/8 yd. for back)
To-go cup and removable insulation cuff from your favorite coffee shop

Approximate dimensions of the end product: 3” X 4.75” Which will fit a medium to-go coffee cup perfectly.

1) Select several scraps of fabric that you love.  I’m making this coffee cuff for my daughter’s dance teacher.  She is a hep cat kind of gal, so I chose funky, high contrast fabrics with sassy space cats as the focus. 

2) If you’ve chosen fabric scraps, lay the pieces right sides together and sew into a 5” X 12” strip using a straight stitch. (Pink arrow)
(If you’re nervous about getting the seams straight, go a head and pin each pair of pieces together before you sew.  These pieces are fairly short though, so its easy to hold them together with your fingers.)

3) Open up your fabric strip and use your iron to press all the seams flat.  Your strip will be quite jagged and off-kilter, but never fear, we’ll trim that all off eventually.

4) Carefully take apart the insulation cuff from your favorite coffee house and use it as a template to cut your batting. (blue arrow)  Keep some extra batting all the way around your template, as you’ll lose some size when you stitch the cuff.  (In this photo you can see that the batting I cut is much wider than my corrugated cuff.  I like a lot of coverage between my fingers and my hot drink, so I make my coffee cuffs cover a larger swath of the to-go cup.)



5) The top and batting for your coffee cuff are now ready to go!  It’s time to cut the back layer of the quilt “sandwich.”  Using the just-cut batting as a template, cut the fabric for the bottom of your quilt sandwich. 
Here I used a fat quarter of that funky space cat fabric for the back layer of my sandwich.  There’s enough fabric here that I don’t even need to piece scraps together. Just cut and place.



6)  Lay each of your three pieces out on the table to make a “quilt sandwich” in this order:
Bottom: Fat quarter fabric facing right-side DOWN (green arrow)
Middle: Medium loft batting (blue arrow)
Top: Pieced fabric strip facing right-side UP (pink arrow)

7) Pin all three layers together along the length of the cuff so the layers won’t shift as you sew.

8) Begin at one end of the cuff and sew a straight stitch along the length of the cuff. 
Repeat about ¼ inch away from your first line of stitching.  Repeat.  Repeat. Repeat until you’ve got the entire cuff covered in quilted lines of stitch.

9) Here’s my space cat all quilted up.  To make your quilting stitches wander around the edge of an image on the fabric: Be sure your machine needle is poking down through the fabric and lift up your presser foot.  Orient the cuff in the new direction you want to stitch.  Put the presser foot back down and continue sewing. 
This fancy little stitch is completely unnecessary though.  Trust me, the cuff would look almost just as cool if I’d stitched straight over space cat’s face instead of around it.

10) Open up the layers of the cuff along one of the long sides and get a feel for where the edge of the batting comes to in the sandwich. (pink arrow) Switch your sewing machine to a medium-length zig-zag stitch.

 

11)  As you feed the cuff through the machine, run your finger along the ridge created by the batting (pink arrow) and make sure that ridge is going right under the needle.  (The zig-zag stitch is sealing up the long side of the quilt sandwich. (Blue arrow))
Do one zig-zag stitch on each length of the cuff.

12) Trim the excess fabric from the outside of each zig-zag stitch, being careful not to cut the stitches you just made. (blue arrow)  Sew 3-4 more zig-zag stitches along the length of each side to overlock the quilt sandwich edges.

13) Using a to-go cup from your favorite coffee place, wrap the quilted cuff around its perimeter to check for fit and to make sure you won’t be cutting all the images you love in the printed fabric.  You can see my cuff is plenty big, and I want to be sure that the space cat doesn’t get trimmed off so I have to manipulate the cuff a little here and there to make sure I preserve all the details I like.
Pin your cuff  in place along its short edge. (pink arrows)

14) Switch your stitch back to a straight stitch briefly and sew one straight stitch along the short edge of the cuff, just to the side of your pins.  Slide the cuff back on the to-go cup to check the fit.  If you’re happy with how it fits on the to-go cup, trim the excess quilt sandwich off the end of the cuff. (pink arrow)

15) Switch back to the zig-zag stitch and do 4-5 zig-zag stitches along the short end of the cuff to overlock the layers.  (blue arrow)

16) Slide the cuff back on your to-go cup to check the fit.

17) Rush right down to the coffee shop and model your new coffee couture.

Thank you, Erin. These make great gift ideas. I'm starting to think about Christmas gifts now--it'll take me a while to get all the projects done!

Psst--If you find this post interesting and think others might as well, would you mind taking a minute to stumble it? It would mean a lot to me.