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Ironing boards used to have a thick padding underneath the cover, and that padding is what my mother used in all her potholders.
This one was made by my mother's mother from some crochet thread that my father-in-law bought at a garage sale. There were two or three balls of it, all this same variegated yellow, and when I showed it to her she snatched it out of my hand and said "They don't give this stuff away."
She made me this potholder and some pillow case edging with it. She was a prolific crocheter, but I think those were the only things she made just for me, so I treasure them.
This next one was made by my mother's sister, Irene, using the same pattern Grandma did for the yellow one. The way women in my mother's family go about dying is they have a hospital bed set up in the living room and that signals they are done cooking and cleaning but they still rule the roost. When Aunt Irene had to go on full-time oxygen and her family refused to buy cigarettes for her, she was ready to die, but it didn't happen right away: she stuck around for five more years, and crocheted grocery bags full of these potholders. She didn't do any afghans because she didn't know if she would live long enough to finish them.
This is one I made using the same general idea as the previous two. It is the only thing I ever successfully crocheted, and I was so thrilled with it, I didn't stop when it was square, just kept on going. It's nice and solid, no burned fingers. I like seeing what kind of pattern comes out of variegated yarn.
In the 1950s my mother started a bunch of these cuties, all hand-embroidered. One is a pear, and the other is an apple, and I can remember using ones like them when I was a small child helping with baking.
The embroidery very likely was done by her friend Dutch Smith while clerking at the Berthoud Liquor Store in the small town where I grew up. They have the good padding already inside, and all they need is to be trimmed to shape and edged with seam binding, remembering the hanging loop at the top.
