These hand warmers began life as perhaps the most expensive children’s underclothes known to man.
Figuring out the right gear for the weather in Germany has been an ongoing education. When my three-year-old’s kind, dear kindergarten teacher told me he needed undershirts, I listened. He needed not just any undershirts, mind you, but silk-wool undershirts, from a boutique. I can’t even bear to tell you how much I paid for them.
Meanwhile, it’s very un-German of me, but I haven’t been able to kick the big ol’ energy-wasting American dryer addiction. Maybe there’s a 12-step program I can enroll in and by the time we leave here I’ll have cleaned up my act. Dryers do exist in Germany, but it’s much more common, regardless of income level, to use a drying rack. I do this some but not enough.
Sadly, this is what happened to one of the costly silk-wool undershirts:
Gasp! All those Euros gone to waste! I couldn’t handle it becoming just a doll shirt, and my daughter had been asking for a set of hand warmers. So I broke out the Kool-Aid (brought from the U.S.) and dyed it, using roughly these instructions.
If I had it to do over, I’d probably use one less packet of Kool-Aid to get a slightly lighter color, but oh well. It’s done. After that I just cut up the middle of the shirt and trimmed the top down so that the arm-piece of the shirt became the thumb-piece of the warmers.
I used an old T-shirt to line the arm warmers and finished them off with blanket stitching. Voila! You could certainly make a similar pair with a shrunken sweater, using the underarm corner as the under-thumb corner.
Are you perhaps considering taking over Heloise’s place on the Internet?
GD Bob
Laugh out loud!
I should say, LOL when I saw the shrunken shirt but I suppose it wasn’t funny at all. I like how you rescued your dilemma with a sense of humor and by recycling.
I love hearing how you are making these attitude and lifestyle adjustments.
So glad to make you laugh and don’t worry I can laugh about it now too now that I have at least made soemthing useful out of the mess.