tea cosy

Cafetiere Cosy and a spot of DIY decor

October 19, 2008 by Katie Lee

Yes, I really am living the dream. Not content with a black and gold tea cosy, I made myself a matching cosy for the cafetière, so now I have TWO tastefully crocheted items in my flat. Crazy, I know.

While I’m at at it, let’s talk about the furnishings. You can just see the white bamboo table which I painted. It was given to us when we moved into our last flat and we had always assumed we would get rid of it when we finally moved into our own place. But in the spirit of trying to recycle and re-use, I decided to paint it.

I made those cushions for the sofa as well. Previously, it was a very tired and old chesterfield, and a lot of the leather had begun flaking off. I bought some duck feather cushions and covered them with material that I bought on eBay. They’re not only helping to increase the life of the sofa, they’re also making it a lot comfier to sit on!

The cream scatter cushion cover is made from the bags that our organic bed linen came in. I didn’t want to waste them and they were exactly the right size for the cushions. Al thinks they’re silly, but I like them! This is what they look like on the other side.

Waste not want not!

And finally, we have the lampshade. Al’s been promising to paint bright flowers on the lampshade for ages, but after about 3 years of waiting, I finally just decided to sort it out myself. Here you can see what it looked like, and how it looks now.

The paper is from an Arts & Crafts wrapping paper book – Victorian paper for a Victorian house!

Black crochet tea cosy – surprisingly tasteful for me

June 25, 2008 by Katie Lee

Those of you who hold each and every update I write close to your bosom, remembering every word and every project as though they were your own children, will have no trouble in recalling this “trendy tea cosy” (as I dubbed it at the time), which went disastrously wrong thanks to an ill-judged bit of sizing guess work on my part.

Well, I finally got the unfinished project back out of my stash box and added the extension required to make it fit my tea pot. And now I have an *actual* bit of tasteful crochet in my house, as well as a very nice warm tea pot. It’s like some kind of Christmas miracle. Except for without the Christmas.

The cosy didn’t really suffer from the half-arsed bit of bodging I had to do to make it big enough. In fact, I rather like the sideways rows I’ve added to each edge of the cosy. And the fact that it’s custom-made to fit my pot gives it that special edge that I know will drive all my friends crazy with tea cosy-envy. They’ll try to hide it with looks of complete indifference or polite interest, but *I’ll* know the truth.

Cosy tea for me

April 3, 2006 by Katie Lee

Yes! There’s a good chance that soon my tea pot may no longer feel the chill of cold air touching its delicate metal underparts. Well, if I ever get round to finishing this thing anyway.

I thought after all that tasteful clothes making it was time to do something nice and ugly again. If it’s ugly and garish you can guarantee I’ll like it. It’s why I was a crap goth.

Anyway, it’s not based on any one pattern. The stitch design is from Jan Eaton’s 200 Crochet Blocks and I’ve just made it big enough to fit my pot (I hope – past experience has taught me that I have brain damage where the successful measuring part of my brain should languish). I’ll start reducing stitches somewhere near the top, and hopefully all will turn out well. If not, I’ll just fob it off on an unsuspecting relative.

Trendy Tea Cosy

March 11, 2006 by Katie Lee

Milway bought me Erika Knight’s Simple Crochet book for Christmas. Until that point I’d been labouring under the illusion that the only way to crochet was with tongue firmly in cheek, but suddenly here was a design book with tasteful patterns in that wouldn’t look out of place in a some City-type’s po-faced loft apartment. Maybe I too could be tasteful!

Alas, the taste-gods have so far rejected me. This trendy tea cosy (or cozy to US citizens) was my verson of the cafetiere cosy (!). Possibly my first mistake was foolishly believing the I have it in me to work out my own designs. My second was ignoring the requests for posh black cotton yarn and using cheapo black acrylic, of which I have an abundant supply. My third was attempting to make something for myself (I’ve proved time and time again that I can’t make something for myself with any hope of success) The gods were already displeased.

I was in a posh hotel making this (a birthday present from Al – I sure know how to make the most of a romantic weekend away, eh?!) so really the surroundings should have been perfect. However, the fatal flaw in all that was that I guessed how big it needed to be to fit my teapot. Sure enough, it turned out to be too small.

I was going to bodge a bit of extra crochet onto the side, but the very thought of giving up my aspirational tea cosy for a half-arsed black cover made me too depressed for words, and the miserable thing has been consigned to my wool box until the day I spot some hapless soul with a correctly proportioned unclothed pot.

Crochet Tea Cosy

March 9, 2006 by Katie Lee

I made this tea cosy for Al’s Gran who wanted something bright and yellow to put on her pot. It was fun to make and easy, but was unlike anything I’d made before thanks to the almost semi-circular style. You start with an oblong and keep going back and forth round it, creating a nice ridged effect. The bottom was unusual as well, using a repeating triangle of double crochet, half treble, treble and double treble to create a band. It uses US names so you’ll need to keep that in mind if you’re a Brit. [Click for bigger pics]