More Potholder Prototypes

I really did intend to post yesterday but it turned into a really crazy day. I was serving 18 for the first night of Passover and I forgot just how much work it can be. Aside from the usual cooking and cleaning there is the added task of unpacking all of my Passover dishes which I only use once a year. Whew!

Thankfully, with quite a lot of help from my girls, we pulled it all together and it all worked out just fine. We fulfilled the requirements of the holiday and everyone left feeling quite full.

Back to the parade of potholders.

There were quite a few potholder patterns on the web that looked interesting to me. The first was the Tumbledown Trivet by Julie Bolduc. What appealed to me about this pattern and also the next one I worked, her the Cool Flames Potholder, was the crochet acrobatics required. In each of these patterns there is a certain amount of crocheting into stitches from previous rows behind chained stitches. I found this to be a lot of fun. I also love the dimensionality that the layers of stitches creates.

The Spiked Hot Pad pattern (also by Julie Bolduc) was similarly fun. In this one the nifty trick is going back a row or two and creating a super-long spike. I like this effect a lot.

One thing I noticed as I worked these potholders is that I'm a very tight crocheter. Because of that, all of these are a little smaller than they ought to be. They also hurt my hands after a while. I'm working hard on loosening up a bit. Crocheting is too much fun to have to give it up due to tight stitches.

The Wild Granny Square is by Julie Bolduc again. I liled it fr the same reasons as the others but I think that the end result is not as neat and tidy as I'd like it to be. Perhaps wild isn't what I go for in a granny square. It's a perfectly nice pattern but just not for me. Tis one is efinitely out of the running.

The last prototype is the Crochet Flower Hot Pad. I love this one! It was weird while I was making it because it looked like a big, floppy, octopus but at the end when you flip the flaps and pin them down it's just magic. I could be very happy crocheting a lot of these but it seems like a bunch of other folks are using this pattern so I won't.

After the post on Tuesday I got a bunch of comments here and there saying that Willow is theway to go. I'm definitely leaning towards Willow or the Tumbledown Trivet. I'll work each again to see if being looser will make a difference. I also want to see how they look in the Sonata. Thanks for all of the input!

Crossposted to the Swap blog.