I usually prepare at least two meals every day, so for me, the kitchen is one of the most important rooms in a home, and I love my kitchen.

It is large and spacious with pretty much everything you could want and, from the floor, to the walls, to the counters, to the cabinets, it’s decorated in a riot of neutrals: beige, ecru, linen, taupe, brown.

Something like this image I found at Flickr, but without the deep purples or greens:

I try to address this tendency toward neutrals with colorful accent pieces. One of my favorites is a pottery vase I purchased. It came with a sticker authenticating the fact that it was made in France with French clay. For me, the sticker sealed the deal.

Here is a photo of it with some yarns that I purchased over a decade ago:

This afternoon I sat down with these yarns, my 3.5 mm Etimo hook, and a pattern for a chrysanthemum dishcloth that I found in the free patterns at bernat.com. But as I wanted a potholder rather than a dishcloth, I used some Classic Elite felted wool roving to better insulate my hands from heat, and a smaller hook than the 5.0 mm hook called for in the pattern. I used the smaller hook because the wool roving I was using is much thinner than the suggested cotton, and I wanted a fabric that was fairly close.

To access the pattern, you need to join bernat.com and search the free patterns. Chrysanthemum is the keyword I used for my search, and it took me right to the page I needed. Directions are available in PDF format in both English and French. The directions for the first 8 rounds were reasonably good, but the 9th round was a little harder to make sense of. For the 9th round, I basically did five chains of a tambour crochet down toward the center, and then back up toward the edge of the petal.

Here is the result:

I am looking forward to making several more so that I can safely take things out of the oven.