Handy Hotpad: Official Tutorial for the Crochetically Savvy

Start with a wash cloth that you like. I like white and that's all I have so that's what I used.

So now you are going to do a tricky kind of fold. And good luck with that because giving you a step by step photographic journey for the fold was beyond my skills and capabilities.

Actually I just got bored with that part because I wanted to crochet. So here is part of the fold.

Bwa-LA! Here is the completed fold. See how easy that was? For those of you who are not rocket scientists and may be spatially challenged like me, you can find info on the net for Origami and just look up how to make a Crane Base. That is all this is, a crane base cloth.Okay, then you are going to carefully cast on to the edges of the cloth with a slip stitch. When you do this at home, it won't be blurry. Unless you are drunk. But do not drink and crochet, please. Many, many crochet fatalities go unrecorded each year and why end up as a statistic? How sad for your family to have to shake their heads and whisper through their tear soaked hankies, " She died in a terrible crochet accident. It was horrible. Bloody. Senseless. We told her not to drink and crochet. We should have taken away her hook."Quite sozzled by now, you can still make out the detail on which direction you will put your slip stitch. It will look like this at some point in the procedure. When you get to the end of the cloth with your slip-stitching, you will turn around, chain up a couple stitches and go back the way you came, doing a shell stitch all the way. Okay, this tutorial is NOT for beginners. A shell stitch is easy but I'd have to actually THINK about how many double crochet to put in each hole and how many single crochet in between and then try to write that all out for you when probably it will all be for nothing because you are going to say, "What the heck do I want with a hot pad made out of washrags anyway?" So I'm just saving myself some stress because math makes me tired.

Here is one side finished, and completely in focus for a change.

Because I am a left handed crocheter, you may be completely confused by now. If you want to make these hot pads BACKWARDS you just go right ahead.

Okay! Isn't it looking kind of cool, now? Like it has turned a new leaf, and is ready to join the ranks of the Big Guys who handle hot pots and casserole dishes fresh from the oven.

I like how jaunty and pretty it looks while sitting up. But it just needs one more thing. A little handle. You just chain onto the top point of the hot pad and make a small chain about 20 stitches and then single crochet around them until it looks sturdy enough to hang on a nail. You figure it out.

Pretty as a Daisy Bloom and no bigger than a tessy wren, my wee little moppet with a handle!

And here we have the finished thing, waiting in the wings for it's chance in the Pot-light. No photography is allowed during the actual performance, as the insurance underwriters feel it would be much too dangerous considering the mess that was made of the pre-production stills.