Tea operated? Time to get knitting.

If I'm completely honest, this blog should probably be called Tea Operated. While I do love gin - I'm writing this (in advance) with a g&t to hand - I frequently go days without having any. I don't know when I last went a day without a cup of tea. I have three types of gin in stock, and more than twenty types of tea.  I own two teapots.

You get the picture. I like tea.

But although I have two teapots, I didn't own anything to keep the tea in them warm. So the time came to get knitting.

This is the first, which I'm giving to my wee brother and his partner next time I see them, because he made the mistake of sounding enthusiastic when I offered to knit him a tea cozy.

Details of the pattern, yarn etc can be found on my Ravelry page here.


And this is the second, which I judged much too over the top to give to anyone else, but I love it.

You can see the pattern and yarn details here.

I modified both patterns slightly because I wasn't happy with the finishing - the first pattern was meant to come with a ribbon on top, the second with fewer, smaller flowers. I used the knitted version of the roses from here but only cast on 25 stitches, did 4 rows of ribbing, and 20 rows of the lines after that, to make smaller roses. I did this after knitting the central rose in the second tea cozy - I just thought it was too big for what I wanted, although it works quite well as the centre of a bouquet!

Knitting twenty roses for the two cozies, all in a row, did become tedious, and because I was putting it off, did take quite a long time. It also started to feel like a critique of modern society and crafting as a hobby - I was using a skill that had once been essential to keep people warm, a central part of life, to make decorative flowers for a tea cozy.

But when I finished the knitting and sewed them all together I stopped over thinking it and started cooing at how pretty they were.