Waste Not, Want Not

Day 110: "Waste not, want not," or as my grandmother used to say, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without," so I'm using up whatever I can salvage from my weaving thrums to make potholders. Since I weave almost exclusively with 8/2 cotton, this is an ideal solution. It must be said, however, that my grandmother was English. My Scottish genes came from my grandfather whose mother, so the story goes, had a dalliance with a McLeod outside her marriage. My knowledge of the backstory ends there, but the frugal DNA runs strong. That said, my grandmother was notorious for using short bits of crochet thread as centers for granny squares, even shorter than the weaving thrums I've used here.

This double-thick pattern is about as simple as it gets in crochet (both sides of one potholder are shown here). Determine the diagonal length you want for your potholder and make an equivalent chain in the fiber of your choice. Cotton insulates your hand against heat quite well (I used a double strand of 8/2 with a 2.0 mm hook). Add an extra inch, ending with an odd number of chains. Sc in the second chain from the hook, and in each subsequent chain. Without turning, sc in the opposite side of the chain until you're back to your starting point (example: I started with 71 sc, which is a nice multiple of 10 plus 1). Crocheting down both sides of the chain gave me 140 sc for the round when I got back to my starting point.) Now without turning, single-crochet half as many rows as you had chains (for me, that was 35). You'll soon see that this begins to form a bag with the chain row at its bottom. When complete, fold the bag, pulling out the closed corners. The opposite corners will be open. Now you'll need to crochet a half row (roughly) to reach an open corner. Once there, make a chain for the hanger. Sc back along the hanger chain, join to the body of the bag and fasten off, leaving a long tail. Use the tail to ladder-stitch the open diagonal (the last sc row made). You're done!

HIndsight: I made this one a little small, having forgotten to allow for the inevitable shrinkage in washing and drying. I should have allowed a few extra stitches in the starting chain to compensate. Not to worry! I still have a bagful of thrums.

It Slices! It Dices!

Day 169: The words of the TV commercial still ring in my ears: "It slices! It dices!" and although I didn't fall prey to the hype, my husband did, and on a notable Christmas morning close to fifty years ago, I became one of the myriad housewives who possessed a Veg-o-Matic. I remember feeling somewhat disappointed when I tore through the wrapping paper, but like several of Bruce's other peculiar gifts, the Veg-o-Matic proved its worth, slicing and dicing its way into an honoured position in my kitchen. I'm not big on food prep. If it broke, I might never again make scalloped potatoes. I suppose it's considered a "vintage" item nowadays, a term which could be applied equally to me. We're both a little stained and dented, not quite as sharp as we were in our salad years, but we still get the job done.

What were some of Bruce's other odd gifts? Well, two spring to mind because they're still standing me in good stead half a century later: 50 spools of sewing thread in every colour but pink, and a 5000-yard cone of common string. Believe it or not, that cone of string was one of the best gifts ever. I only have about a third of it left. Conservation measures have been put into effect.

Lace And Lavender

Day 294: Silly as it seems, I had to remind myself that I wasn't growing lavender as a feature in my flower bed, I was growing it as a crop to be harvested. After making half a dozen lavender bottles (lavender wands), I wanted to make sachets, so picked several bouquets, cleaning the buds from the stems as they dried. I chose a wide glitter-dotted voile ribbon for the sachet fabric and hand-stitched it into two-inch pillows which were stuffed to the max with fragrant, lovely lavender; functional to be sure, but not particularly esthetically pleasing. They needed fancying up with some hand-made lace.

Initially, I'd planned to tat the edgings, but tatting cotton is getting terribly hard to find these days, at least in the #80 size I prefer. I dismissed crocheting as too coarse and common. Bobbin lace? "Little Hearts" from Geraldine Stott's "100 Traditional Bobbin Lace Patterns" is one of my favourites, but it meant that I would have to reduce the number of repeats for a handkerchief edging to one suitable for my sachets. That was easy enough to do, although it did mean making a new pricking.

"Little Hearts" takes 12 pair of bobbins and one gimp thread. I used sewing thread for the lace although it's a bit heavy for bobbin work, because the colour selection can't be beat. The gimp (the heavier thread outlining the hearts) is #8 perle cotton. The lace for each sachet takes approximately six hours to complete, time I spread out over several days, working on other projects in between bobbin binges.

I'm almost done with my fourth edging, and when it's done, I plan to make a few with finer white thread and variously coloured gimps just to have on hand for gifts. Who knows? You might even find a bit of bobbin lace in your Christmas stocking this year if you're good!