One of my colleagues suffers from neck and shoulder pain.  We sit at a computer all day, and she finds that a hot wheat pack really helps to ease her aches.  The hot pack she was using at work had been heated a few too many times – it smelled like burnt toast each time she zapped it in the microwave – so I made her some new ones.

Let me tell you, these are EASY to make! I traced around the outside of her old hot pack to make a pattern, since she liked the way that it sat comfortably around her neck and shoulders.  I used leftover corduroy that was in the stash (some of you may recognise it from clothes I’ve made Clare), sewed it up leaving an opening at one end, turned and topstitched it, still leaving that opening at the end, then filled it with wheat. Each one took a kilogram. Apparently pearl barley works even better than wheat – Mr Thornberry once worked for the wheat board and would you believe they investigated the heat retaining properties of different grains in hot packs. Anyway, I happened to have wheat, so that is what I used. The other side is plain corduroy, for when my colleague wishes to be more sedate.

I sewed the lines across each one after they were filled and the end sewed up (which I did on the machine) – make sure that you use a jeans needle and push the grain away from the presser foot and needle as much as you can before doing this. The stitching lines make sure that the wheat won’t all fall down to the ends when it’s around your neck.

These are really quite easy to make and it wouldn’t take much to customise one for where you need to wear your hot pack. My colleague took one home and has the other one at work, where it no longer smells like a bakery each time she needs to heat it up.