Yes, I even sew a bit too

  Well, I wouldn't say that I'm a great sewer, but I do own a machine and can sew when the need arises. My mother-in-law mentioned that she would love to have a few more reusable heat packs for her birthday this week, so I thought why not. I usually use a nice cotton quilting fabric, double thick, with a few seams and it's done. I prefer to use flax seed and since discovering that my local dollar store sells one-pound bags of it for a dollar, it seems very inexpensive to do.


  Around Halloween time, I was in the Goodwill shop, across the street from the Everett Imagine Children's Museum, where DragonNight has been volunteering, and found some wonderful socks with skull & crossbones on them. I thought "I wonder if I could use these to make heat packs with?". They went on the back burner of projects, since I was working on various knitting projects. I figured eventually I'd get around to sewing them (which is how I think of all of my sewing projects). 

  So I ran out yesterday (since we were supposed to be celebrating both my MIL & Little Bigfoot's birthday today) to find some fun socks to make into heat packs for my MIL. I found these one. I love the Betty Boop ones. Since they were ankle socks, I made pocket warmers and then each pair of knee socks equaled two 12"(ish) long neck packs and two smaller 3-4" pocket packs. On the Betty Boop ones I made them just with the socks and tested them. They didn't really retain their heat very long, so I used cotton tube socks and then sewed the decorative (polyester/spandex) socks over them. They work fairly well, not quite as good as my fabric ones, but they are fun and super easy and quick to make and will warm you up if you are chilly or need just a little heat on your neck or head. I highly recommend storing the large ones in the freezer and then just microwaving them a bit longer when you need heat instead of cold. The cold that these packs give off is a very nice soothing chill rather than the cold freeze you get from ice packs.


  Just decided to postpone our birthday get-together until next weekend though, since the weather decided to be unpredictable and rather icky. Snow & ice doesn't generally slow down the Redneck or myself, but rather other drivers' skills behind the wheel in this weather strongly influence us to just stay home.