So, I make lace shawls with small (3mm diameter) crochet hooks. It’s possible to buy hooks with handles, but they don’t really fit my hand, and tend to be hard plastic. I’ve made them in the past from sugru, and that works pretty well. But it takes a LOT of sugru, which is not cheap, and ideally I’d like a result with a little more give. I don’t want it squishy, but a bit softer. More like a rubber pad than a memory foam one.
Some people stick the hook through a tennis ball, but that is much too big for my hands. If I could find a rubber golf ball, that would be about right. If I could squish it out more oblong in shape, that would be even better.
Any ideas for material I could use that would stick well to metal and give a bit of respite to my fingers?
I looked on Amazon they’re about a million listings for pink rubber balls in many sizes
They cut easy. We used to carve them for weird printing in art class.
The tiny tennis balls look just like tennis balls. Packs of 4. Cheap.
My cats own some foam rubber golf ball toys, but those might be a touch too squishy for your purposes. You might want to take a look if you’re near a pet supply that has those.
From the FAQs:
HOW THICK CAN I APPLY PLASTI DIP?
When following the directions, you can apply as many coats of Plasti Dip protective coating as you like.
And Beck, they have a “craft” version with tons of colors and finishes. . .
You can get moldable plastic and shape it into anything you like and embed a crochet needle in it. You may have to bend the needle so it doesn’t come loose inside your handgrip. You can warm up the stuff with hot water or even a hair dryer and shape it with your hands or push into some kind of mold like one of those plastic eggs.
If they are polypropylene bags then they would melt at 170ºC or so; I am talking about this polymer:
which is not toxic, andd at least slightly biodegradable, but I don’t know what the environmental footprint of its industrial manufacture is.
One can make compostable plastic bags out of it, but I would triple-check if that is what your old grocery bags are actually made from (do they melt in boiling water?)
Old enough grocery bags don’t melt. They do burn at a high enough temperature because they were made out of paper. More recent versions have been made of polyethylene and the biodegradable versions are PVA based. I don’t think they’ll be moldable in the same way as PCL, although you could make them into something but I think higher temperatures would be required for the result to have useful mechanical properties, which will be quite limited.
ETA: My state has decided the world has too many trees and plastic bags can no longer be provided by stores so paper bags have to be used if you don’t bring your own containers.