As you may know from my Facebook posts, our house is generally kept at a temperature that the Inuit would be comfortable with, except we don’t have lovely caribou fur jackets to keep us toasty warm. 

So to keep warm, we had been using some homeemade hot packs, otherwise known as “Eric’s old socks filled with rice.” You think I’m joking:

As my friend Zoe said to me, “You’re not that poor.” So I set out to make some nicer ones.  This of course, involved something for which I have NO talent: sewing.  I can fix the odd hem and rip and things, but the one time I tried to fix something more complicated, I ended up sewing a sleeve shut.  Sometimes I do think about getting a machine and taking a class, because sewing is just so instant gratification in a way that knitting is not.  But I need another crafty item to spend money on like a hole in the head, and if Eric gets irritated with my knitting stuff being around the house, I can only imagine how he’d react with small bits of thread and fabric strewn over the floor. 

Zoe was kind enough to let me use her sewing machine, and we went to Fancy Tiger and got some cool fabrics and stitched up some great little pouches!  I got coordinating fabrics to make them different on both sides, and just love how they look.

Took a bit of trial and error to figure out the best way to get the rice in and sew the divisions-given that these are the first things I’ve sewed they’re not super pretty, or even, or straight at all, but I’m still proud of myself! Now, the crafty perfectionist in me is irritated by the white thread and the uninteresting stitching pattern and the exposed seam, but I just have to give that up. 

These are big, big hits in our house-the kids and I use them every night to heat our beds up before getting in and they make a world of difference.  

Next up: I’ve just about finished a tank top just in time for the weather to get truly freezing, working on some fingerless gloves for the kids (and maybe their teachers if I can get my act together), a sweater in progress, and a long delayed scarf for Eric that I’m sure he’ll never wear and will just cause us to argue.