I have spent the entire previous week doing my version of Spring cleaning. It doesn't necessarily mean I've gone through and made things spotless! My version of the big spring clean is to clean out the old dull tired looking kitchen towels, pot holders, placemats, etc. Time to bring some of those bright spring colors in! (As I'm writing this, we are once again getting hit with another winter storm here in the north eastern US - I'm muttering "lovely" with as much sarcasm as I can muster)I made the flower pot holder by adapting a crochet pattern I found online. I love this pattern and will probably make a few more. The pattern can be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20071227052119/http://www.angelfire.com/folk/celtwich/Prettypetals.html. I love the classics!
The v-ribbed pot holder and the red and orange placemat were patterns I found in Vintage Crochet for your Home book by Coats & Clark. Again, you can't go wrong with the classics, or is it vintage? Either way, I love it!
The lime-green, white and orange hand towel pattern was in my latest (Spring 2013) issue of Creative Knitting and was the catalyst for my need for festive colors in the kitchen. I'm including a link to the related tutorial here: http://www.creativeknittingmagazine.com/video.html/video.html?id=21
Now that my kitchen is a little brighter, the rest of the rooms seem a little dull. I'm now looking through the yarn stash and thumbing through my stack of pattern books and thinking about the possibilities that this week will bring. That's one of the true gifts of crafting - we really can make our little bits of the world as bright as we need it to be.