January has been "restock" month for us, here at Acorns & Twigs. We sold out of several products during the busy Christmas shopping season and one of those things were refill loops for our 7" Potholder looms from Friendly Loom™  by Harrisville Designs.. 

When we get the loops, they are randomly mixed in three different categories: 

Since we sell the colors individually, our job is to sort those babies. It's a whole family activity, and it takes about 3 hours for each color group. The two little ones work on their color sorting and the two older get to help count them, making sets of 18 of each and we all work on our endurance. 

And since it's the beginning of the year, I am also in the mind set of "starting off right". It's been on my to-do list all last year to take better product pictures for our store, so I decided to start with the loops. Amy, Blake and I have taken on the task of making one potholder out of each of the 34 colors that we offer. 

We got eight done on the first day. I'm guessing, if we stick to it, we can get them done by the end of the weekend?? Big maybe.

As a creative, it's hard to stay on track and stick to one thing and get it finished before I start the next idea. My brain is bubbling over! 

I was thinking about what I'm going to do with all these uni colored potholders after I have taken my product photos. 

And my thoughts started flowing. Oh the ideas I have! I will be rolling out some pretty cool projects later, here on the blog. My list keeps growing...

Another thing I was thinking, was that I want to come up with a bunch of seasonal patterns for potholders. Starting with Valentines day, spring, Easter - lions, tigers and bears, oh my!

And my friends - I will! But that will all have to wait. I am practicing endurance here. I am sticking with the color palette potholders first. But I'm writing down all my thoughts for later. 

Ok, so I can't just make potholders all day. I just can't.

I had to do some research, to justify my thoughts. I went to Pinterest, and started a board of inspiration for my seasonal patterns. (<-- You can check it out by clicking on that purple text.)

As I dug deeper, I found some designs I like, but not the right colors.

I'm going for reds, pinks, purples and white for Valentines day. 

Pastels for spring.

Orange, green and yellows for Easter.

Or something like that. Anyways, so I was going to try to copy the designs and some of them were pretty advanced. I am visual, so I tried sketching them out before I went to the loom. 

Well, friends, instead of making the potholders, I came up with this...

A printable PDF Potholder Loom Pattern Planner.

This way you can just print it out, grab some colors and start planning. Very handy. 

You can design your 6"x 6" sized potholders with this diagram. Try different color combinations, keep record of your favorite patterns, or try to copy the ones you find on Pinterest and your favorite blog, like I did. 

Included is the pdf pattern planner, instructions to use the planner and a handy color chart of the available loop colors for quick reference. 

Check it out here in our shop.

Here are the products that I mentioned in this post. They are all available in our shop: 

www.acornsandtwigs.com