Tea Cosy

How dreadfully cliche. A knitted tea cosy. Conjures up images of little old grannies with rocking chairs and cats. But I needed one, damnit! And though the idea of a rocking chair is rather appealing, I'm allergic to cats and neither little, old, nor a grandmother.

With all of my other projects on needles getting to the bulky/unwieldy stage it was good to have something small and portable.

I started out with the pattern for Irish Knit Tea Cosy over at the Knitlist gift exchange.

I say 'started out' because I seem to find it impossible to follow patterns to the letter at the moment.

The first alteration I made was to cut out the popcorn stitch all together and substituted the trinity stitch I enjoyed so much in dad's jumper. (I have an aversion to bobbles.) That meant casting on an extra two stitches initially - one for each panel - to even things out. I also made the cables symetrical, one forward and one back (C4F and C4B) surrounding the Diamond panel.

The diamond was my first experience with travelling stitches and I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out - and all without a cable needle too! Go me!

The other alterations came later on and were more crisis measures than design elements. But don't tell anyone I said that.

So I cast on my 54 sts in a pale blue denim-ish colour wool I'd found in an op shop a while back and happily knitted away. Knitting without thinking, 'till there were two of the diamond patterns on each piece.

No casting off because I wanted to do circular decreases at the top. I joined both pieces on dpns and marked my 6 decrease points (108 divides nicely by 6). I started with a purl round so the top would sit flat. The decreases were worked around six C2F mini-cables with one purl stitch on each side - the decreases hidden under the purls. I decreased 12 sts every 2 rounds 'till there were about 12 sts left which I then cast off leaving a small hole for the tea pot lid.

Top end/Sideways teapot

Here's where some of the crisis measures came into play. Remember how I said I was knitting without thinking? My thoughtless extended to forgetting the actual size of my tea pot. What I had knitted wrapped around it about twice. Stupid, stupid Sophie. So I counted my rows and made a small snip to unpick a row, and then I frogged. Sigh. I tend to do that a fair bit. Probably something to do with my bad habit of designing on the needles rather than swatching. Still, no harm done.

After undoing all my beautiful knitting <sob> I picked up the loops to knit some replacement ribbing in the round. (Oh, and I finally understand what people mean when they talk about stitches being half a loop out when you knit in the opposite direction. Picking up the trinity stitch was especially tough.)
But hey, it's only ribbing and even I can't tell the difference, so no biggie.

Things I'd do differently next time:
(1) Measure the bloody teapot.
(2) Start the ribbing in the round before dividing for the patterns and closing in the round again - this provided ready made holes for the handle and spout.
Everything else seemed to work okay and I'm pleased with the whole thing.

Plus, hot tea ;-)