Mexican Food on my Mind

 I've been wanting to make a tortilla warmer for quite a while - since starting to make my own corn tortillas, in fact. 

We can even get the corn flour in our Canadian grocery stores! It's usually on the bottom shelf under the other Mexican food items.

I also unearthed the tortilla press we brought back from when we lived in Mexico in the mid-60s like this one Amazon sells:

A batch of dough usually makes 15 - 20 tortillas so I freeze what we don't use in that first meal. I've been warming them in the microwave in a tea towel, which works well. But I wanted to make a dedicated tortilla warmer because I had all the materials - cotton batting, cotton thread, and cotton fabrics. It's important to use all cotton materials because synthetics could melt in the microwave in the reheating process.

I couldn't tell the difference between some cotton muslin and broadcloth (poly/cotton) that I had in my stash so I cut up an old (clean) sheet that still had the 100% cotton label affixed to it. 

I watched this video and got to work.

My tortilla press is 6" in diameter so I added 3.5 more inches to accommodate a stack of tortillas and so the warmer would close during reheating.

I cut two 9.5" circles each of the lining (sheet), Mexican-themed fabric, and cotton batting.

Within 10 minutes of sitting down to sew, I had a finished project!

The 600 thread count sheeting makes for a lovely interior. LOL.

If you customarily warm flour tortillas, they tend to be bigger so you would need to make your warmer proportionately bigger as well.

I've also been toying with making fabric out of the selvages I've been collecting. A couple of quilting friends are also going to be giving me their selvages.

I plan to make more thread-catching 'tacos' 

and thought selvages would look cute as the exterior fabric. I used a piece of muslin/broadcloth (whatever) as the base fabric and sewed the selvages to it on a 45º angle. Basically the finished selvage edge covers the cut edge and I stitched very close to the finished edge. Then I trimmed everything to 5" x 10". This will make 2 'tacos'.

I'm all about the randomness of it. Some of the selvages didn't have a lot of the coloured fabric. Early on in my sewing, I would trim right close to it but now I usually cut an inch in from the selvage edge to reveal the coloured fabric as well.  Some suggest cutting 1.25" to 1.5" in from the selvage edge. 

Some selvages have the actual pattern on them, some are blank. Others have the numbered colours on them and others, the name of the fabric or designer.

I didn't obsess over the 45º thing. I just drew lines the correct angle every couple of inches or so on the base fabric and aligned the selvages before sewing them down.

Most of my selvages are not very long. I'm hoping the ones I get from my quilting friends are longer so I can make bigger yardage.

There are all kinds of cool projects I could make with this selvage fabric. Stay tuned.