Cotton wash mitts, and warmth

Mine is an old house, and despite the best efforts of central heating, it gets cold at night upstairs, as in I have a hard time believing there’s actually heat coming out the register at all. Once the door is shut, the room turns into a refrigerator. The old dog won’t even sleep in there anymore. I have finally had it with huddling under a hundred pounds of blankets, trying to keep all the bare parts of me from peeking outside the covers. I’ve been known to wear a wool hat and arm warmers to bed. That’s not okay with me, y’all. These are not pioneer times. Heck, in pioneer times, they slept next to the stove, didn’t they? They knew what they were doing. I know I’m the only one; I know almost everybody loves to sleep in a cold room, and I know this because no matter who I’m talking to, that’s what they tell me, and I just don’t get it at all. I don’t want to burrow under a heavy heap of blankets and wear wool socks and deal with a hot water bottle (those eventually get cold, you know), I want, you know, a reasonable amount of ambient warmth. Now. You can see I’m still obsessing about the temperature. So we bought this little fake stove. Dang, it’s so perfect and adorable! I cranked it up to about nine and went to bed, and hoo! Warm. Me: “Ahhh! It’s so nice in here! (waves bare leg around to demonstrate) Don’t you think it’s nice in here?” Him, stripping to his skivvies: “We’ll see…” He slept flat on his back with no blankets at all, so maybe we could dial it back to eight. Anyway, finding a spot for the stove in the bedroom meant rearranging some furniture, which led to a whole bunch of puttering, with me mopping floors and moving shelves and then curating little vignettes on them with what we already had around here, and the puttering spilled over into the hallway, and then into the bathroom, because when you tidy one room, suddenly the room next to it looks like a yard sale, all of which finally led to me crocheting these cotton wash mitts. The bathroom needed some stripes, and I needed to sit down and take a break. I know you know how it is.

I love how that faucet is so shiny you can see me in it. Yes! Clean. I started with this pattern, and then sort of adjusted to suit my yarn amounts and whims. The yarns are all aran or worsted weight cottons, scraps from the stash, and I used a 4.0mm hook. They look so nice and stripe-y, and they’re useful, too. Utility crafts. Now it’s a warm bubble bath, a cozy flannel nightie, then straight to bed by the flickering (fake) firelight. It’s like a dream come true. Take that, winter.