Plus, holiday crafting. Ugh. Don't even get me started on how awful it is. It's nice to think that you'll make some people their gifts this year, but then you forget about it until December. And then everything goes to hell in a hand basket. That's why all the hardcore crafters do "Christmas in July" isn't it??
Enter the Crochet Flower Hot Pad on Ravelry. Super interesting to look at, yet a piece of cake to crochet (and it's free!). What's not to love? I was able to whip up several of these in a short amount of time, however there's a huge caveat here. I could have left them as-is after crocheting, but I wanted these to be more or less functional as potholders too. I couldn't have all those holes in them, so I decided I wanted to sew up all the holes. This took twice as long as the actual crocheting, probably due to the striping, since I wanted to make the seams as unobtrusive as possible.
I made a bunch of these for my aunts while I was visiting over the holidays, it was like kitsch-on-demand! Everyone wanted one as soon as they saw me making one (I was initially only making the 2 for N's parents as a thank-you-for-hosting-me gift).
I did them all up in Lily Sugar'n Cream cotton yarn, and I really do love them even if I didn't get to keep a single one and they drove me crazy. Plus, they use hardly any yarn at all. I probably squeezed 5 of them out of a single ball of the Ecru.
Made these two pretty colorways for N's parents.
See the picture above for all the seams I had to close up, and I did it all in the secondary color (orange here). I used one long tail to sew them all closed so I had to be very careful to stay within the correct stripe as I went from seam to seam. It was aggravating, and if I never crochet another one of these for at least a few months, I'll be happy.
'Til next year easy-but-aggravating pattern!
