When I used to work at a cof­fee shop I was always very appre­cia­tive of peo­ple who brought their own reusable mugs or cup sleeves. We went through a mind-bog­gling amount of those every day and it was so nice to see peo­ple care about reduc­ing waste.

And Mike likes to wear wrist cuffs — he claims that it keeps him warm in his freez­ing office. But it prob­a­bly did­n’t keep him warm enough because he need­ed to peri­od­i­cal­ly head down­stairs for cups of hot tea at the cof­fee shop.

The prob­lem of over air-con­di­tion­ing aside, I thought it would be fun to com­bine wrist cuff and cup sleeves! I also con­ve­nient­ly made this up for a begin­ner’s cro­chet work­shop, so I tried to be as sim­ple and straight­for­ward as pos­si­ble. There’s no but­ton­hole or any­thing com­pli­cat­ed. But if you’re up for more chal­lenge, I saw this reeeeeal­ly nice beer bracelet pat­tern on Cro­chet by Faye — I’d like to try that out myself one day!

I find this web­site help­ful when learn­ing with videos of cro­chet stitches.

Here’s what I did:

Mate­ri­als / tools:
Small amount of worsted weight yarn
2 large but­tons (mine were about 1″ in diameter)
Nee­dle and thread
5mm hook
A cof­fee cup for size-testing

Row 1: I made 9 chains (ch). You can make more or few­er ch if you want your cuff to be wider or narrower.

Row 2: ch 2, sin­gle cro­chet stitch (sc) in the 3rd stitch from hook, sc in each ch across.

Row 3: ch 3, turn (see instruc­tion for turn­ing chain). Skip first sc, dou­ble cro­chet stitch (dc) in each sc across. Place last dc in ch 2 from row below (the ch 2 counts as an sc stitch).

Row 4 and on: Con­tin­ue to make rows of sc or dc or both until cuff is long enough to wrap around wrist.

When cuff is long enough to wrap around wrist: ch 4, turn. Skip first stitch, triple cro­chet stitch­es (tr) across. This row serves as but­ton holes for wrist cuff.

Con­tin­ue to make a cou­ple more rows of sc and dc until the cuff is long enough to wrap around the cup.

When cuff is long enough to wrap around cup: ch 4, turn. Skip first stitch, tr across. This row serves as but­ton holes for cup sleeve.

Next row: ch 1, turn. Skip first tr, sc in each tr across. Fas­ten off.

Note: it’s bet­ter to make it a bit too short than a bit too long, it will stretch over time.

The dia­gram below may give you an idea of the construction…

Final­ly, sew but­tons on the first sc row. When sewing but­ton on thick fab­ric (such as some­thing cro­cheted), I find this instruc­tion from Wiki How useful:

For but­tons that get heavy use, try wrap­ping the long thread of the nee­dle tail around the threads that hold the but­ton, at least 4 or 5 times, tight­ly, then force the nee­dle and thread through the tight bunch of threads that you have cre­at­ed. Try push­ing the nee­dle par­al­lel to the the but­ton’s holes, to avoid resis­tance. Use a thim­ble for push­ing the nee­dle. (The rea­son for this is sim­ple: thread wear will cause the but­ton to fall off soon­er, unless you wrap the exposed threads with a pro­tec­tive wrap.) Once you have forced the nee­dle through, push it back into the cloth, and tie it off with the long tail that you left at the start­ing knot. 

This is how the sewn but­tons would look:

Depend­ing on who you’re mak­ing this cuff for, the tr row for the wrist may not be nec­es­sary. You see, appar­ent­ly Mike’s wrist is the same size as the cof­fee cup…

I hap­pen to have ridicu­lous­ly small wrists due to Asian genes, so I need­ed the cuff to be adjustable. Any­way. I hope this is not too con­fus­ing. If you have any ques­tion, feed­back or com­ment please feel free to drop me a note! And I hope you enjoy the cool­er evening and hot drinks as our hemi­sphere wel­comes the arrival of fall!