Pot Holders No 9436 - 1945

I chose to make the pot holder on the right in the photo below mostly because I was curious on how that would work with the lines across it and many of the others were pretty plain crochet stitches with fancy appliques like the grape one below.

No 9436 suggested materials included; J&P Coats Crochet Cord, 1 ball each of Ecru and Hunter Green and a steel crochet hook No 7 (1.65mm). I decided to use Aunt Lydia's Silver/Gray and Purple #10 crochet thread. I assumed that it would be close to the same as crochet cord since it uses a 1.65mm hook and most of the patterns with #10 thread also use that size. The closest the pattern comes to giving a gauge is the starting chain, "Ch 60 (to measure 6 1/2 inches".

The gray/background was pretty easy to work. It's single crochets with a triple thrown every 8th stitch and offset each row in a four row repeat. Those triples make the loops that you thread a string of single crochets through.
They give you measurements for the strings but those didn't match up with the actual lengths I needed and they had you make just seven which is only enough to do them in one direction. I read the directions multiple times to be sure I didn't miss them saying something like, "and do the same for the other direction" but it wasn't there.  For the second direction, I ended up using single crochet foundation stitches so I could measure it as I went to fit better. That also gave me the bonus of having a thread to sew down the ends on both ends instead of two on one end. Getting these threaded through and then making them lay flat was harder than I thought and I just gave up on the flat part at some point. They wanted you to tack the ends in place on the wrong side and I ended up using the ends to sew the purple pieces down throughout the potholder a little more. 

Here's what it looked like after all of the single crochet pieces were threaded through and before I tacked everything down with the ends.

The next step says to add padding. Their directions for padding say, "Cut flannel or cotton battings lightly smaller and lining material slightly larger than the crocheted piece. Place padding between crocheted piece and lining. Turn under edges of lining and sew to edges of crocheted piece with neat over-and-under stitches." After that they want you to make an edging by crocheting a chain with 4 strands held together and then sew it on. That seemed like more work than was necessary for the edging so before I did the padding I just crocheted a border of single crochet/chain repeated on it and then added the padding. 
I had padding and fabric that would work but my sewing was not neat.

I did one extra thing with this. The padding seemed like it was kind of floating in the middle so I sewed along the purple lines to make it sort of quilted and hold everything together.

It's definitely usable but absolutely not county fair material and not something I would make again.

Rating:
Is the pattern easy to understand? It's easy to understand but there were ways to do the purple parts in easier ways so I'll give it 0.75
Does it look like the photo or illustration? Yes. 1.0
Would someone use this? Yes, and in this case it's one that will probably get used more because it isn't as pretty as some of the others I've made. 1.0
Did I enjoy making it? I don't like to hand sew things so this sat for about a week until I pulled out the fabric and batting. I start out stitching ok but get impatient and my stitches get bigger. Getting the strands through the loops was also frustrating. 0.25

Total 3.0