It is an understatement to say BC’s mom is cute. To me she is the personification of a cupcake; bright, cute, and it’s always fun when she’s around. So I was more than happy to oblige when she kindly mentioned wanting crocheted potholders for her birthday.

Now, I’m not a crocheter. I have crocheted; in fact I made BC’s mom a crocheted scarf for my first Christmas with her, but alas, it is not my craft. That meant I needed to find something that wasn’t overwhelming for me to take on. I tried and failed at figuring out the thermal stitch, and my single crochet doesn’t look nice and even enough to be able to nicely bind two together to make a thick potholder, so I went even more basic. I bought three 2oz balls of colorful yarn and set out to make simple, single-crochet potholders.

I should say that although cute, these aren’t going to be Jules’ heavy-duty potholders. She’d probably burn herself trying to take a metal tray out of the oven with these, but what they’re perfect for is: hot dishes in the microwave, hot mugs of tea and cocoa, and protecting surfaces from too-hot dishes. Also, adding little pops of color to the kitchen.

it starts with a chain of 30

I started these bad boys with a chain of 30. This is comical because none of my potholders ended up being 30 stitches wide. The widest, the yellow, was 25 stitches, the others around 21 or 22. This just proves my ineptness at basic crochet…good thing it doesn’t take away from the final product, making this a perfect beginner project.

Then it’s just single crocheting the day away. I went for almost squares, eyeballing it when I felt it was the right size and shape. After my last row I chained a few stitches to make a loop for easily hanging the potholders. I think they’re darling.

Now, as always, I like to err on the side of ‘handmade’, not ‘homemade’, so I figured I better make some adorable packaging to give these little yarn balls of love to Ms. Jules.

I designed a simple label in Photoshop to print out and wrap around the three potholders. If you’d like to use this style of label for your own gifts, I’ve made it into a template that can be downloaded here. You’ll also need the main headline font, which you can download here. The secondary font is Baskerville, which most computers have already.

After getting a printed result I liked, I grabbed a piece of cardstock to back the label paper. I chose an off white to help warm up the tan/gray stripes.

I’m pretty terrible at cutting in a straight line with scissors (on paper at least), so I used my self-healing mat, ruler, and x-acto blade to get straight edges. Then it was just a matter of gluing the paper to the cardstock (I used a light layer of glue from a glue stick) and wrapping it around my folded potholders. I held everything in place with a DM sticker.

And that’s that! All ready to give to sweet Julesy-poo when she gets here later. What are some of your favorite handmade gifts that you’ve made or received?

Love, Dylan