Trial and Error

Last year, when a friend of mine showed me the hot pads that her grandmother had made I was totally amazed, and ever since I have wanted to make them.

Recently, I found the pattern and some additional examples on Ravelry. I was also inspired by Clutter My Couch’s Squiggly Potholders.

So, for the last few days, I have been experimenting with this new project. This is the pattern that I am using as a basis for my project and the reason for my experimentation is the pattern calls for rug yarn, but I am using crochet thread instead, which is the material used in the original potholders shown above.

It has been quite a bit of work to get this worked out, because I really want my Hot Pads to have very thick ruffles like in the ones done by my friends grandmother, but this is what I have been getting. Not exactly what I had hoped for.

So far, I have found that it is of the utmost importance to have the squares on the grid smaller rather than larger. Even after increasing the number of double crochets in each section the ruffle still doesn’t fill in the gaps as much as I would like. So back to the drawing board I went, with a smaller needle and a more deliberate mindset to make the stitches smaller with the grid.

Even though I used the same number of stitches I was able to make the grid considerable smaller as you can see here with the smaller grid layed on top of the first grid made.

But even with the smaller grid and after increasing the number of double crochet in each section I am still not getting the perfect ruffle. The only thing I feel I can do at this point is to continue to add additional double crochet stitches per section until I find the perfect combination. That is my project over the next few days, because I am determined to make these cool potholders.

Once I perfect the process, I will be writing a formal pattern for this “Hot Pad” so that no one else has to go through what I have expereienced over the last two days. Look for it in the next week or so.