Hotties are god sent.
In times of need and distress they soothe and comfort.
In winter they warm our beds and our bones and all year round, the bassinets of our babies.
There is nothing more thoughtful or romantic than to slip a hotty into the bed of an unsuspecting guest or lover.
There are however, both good and bad things to be said about hotties.
Brand new hotties can be very stinky in a toxic kind of way. The best hotties therefore are the ones that are snaffled from grandmothers cupboards, their smooth skin having stood the test of time between flanettettes and flesh and lay waiting to be held tight once more. Or failing the ability to snaffle them, do check the new ones you are buying fit the stardards required here.
There are also tricks to filling hotties. My mother showed me how to pour the water in slowly so it doesnt spit back at you and how to burp the air bubble out of it at the end.
A good hottie needs to be at least half full, but no more than 2/3rds.
A hottie filled with boiling water will need to be wrapped inside something so it wont scold the skin. It will radiate its warmth for a good 6 hours or so.
Thankfully hotties still seem designed to a fairly universal standard. Which means that any hotttie cover you make will generally fit any hotty.
Here's how to make a basic hottie cover...
Lay your hottie out and draw around it leaving a good inch extra for seam allowance and ease.
Fold your pattern piece in half long ways and trim or reshape it to get it looking nice and symetrical.
Open it back up and cut this out in your choosen fabric. This will be piece A of 3 panel pieces. You can decorate this piece before or after you sew the hottie cover up, depending on how fussy you are and what you are adorning it with.
To make an opening to slip the hottie inside, you will need to overlap the 2 back pieces B and C. This is done by firstly folding the pattern in half and making a crease line.
Open it up and mark this crease with a pen. Then make another crease line on your pattern half way between the first crease and the top sholder curves.
As you can see, panel B will run from the very top of the hottie to the half way crease.
Panel C runs from the bottom of the hottie to the highest crease line.
Cut out both panel pieces B and C as shown from your fabric.
When you are ready to sew the hottie cover up, lay the 3 panal pieces right sides together with panel B in the middle. I used the blanket stitched edge of an old blanket as a feature of the opening. You can use any machine, either over locker or straight sewer or if its felt or felted wool your using you could probably just hand sew it together.
We were formerly using pillows slips to house our hotties in. The kids would drag them along the ground in the mornings, as if there was some stone cold blubbery dead thing inside that needed to be buried. I was worried the pillow cases would eventually rip or the hotties might burst their seams. Countless times, I have stumbled out of bed and stood on a tepid, cast out hottie, narrowly avoiding a small tsunami. Perhaps we are lucky but of all my years of accidentally standing on them and watching the kids do the same, we have yet to break an ankle or witness a hottie bomb go off. I imagine it would explode rather like a wet whoopy cushion.
I wonder...
Do hotties get mouldy inside?
Does anyone actually prefer a wheat bag warmed in the microwave?
I'm a hottie girl hands down. But I'm interested in your thoughts.
It's like talk back radio here today.
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