Woo Hoo

Caution: contains knitting

As advertised, a parcel arrived yesterday – a big soft squishy parcel containing these:

more crack, sorry, wool

The fruit of my cousin’s latest car boot foray (I wonder if he could also pick me up one of these?). So, what to knit? I’m currently leaning towards something along these lines. What do you think?

Anyway, because someone asked (and because, secretly, I think it’s pretty damn cool) I’ve decided to divulge the secrets of my mug cosy. Those of you not into knitting, look away now

First up, here’s the top-secret detailed blueprint for the mug cosy. Yes, that is the back of an envelope, what do you design things on? Obviously it’s written in secret knitting code, because looking at it now, I can’t understand a word of it. But thinking back, the design process went a bit like this:

The other half wanted something that would not only keep his mug warm, but would also protect his chest in bed from his hot mug during the early stages of the coffee-eking process. All the mug cosy designs that I could find were just sleeves to go round the sides of the mug with nothing that went underneath it. What he wanted was more like a cup-holder that his mug would slot into.

Thinking about it, I decided that a mug cosy was, in essence, just a small upside-down hat. So I took this pattern and scaled it down to be mug sized, but allowing for shrinkage during the felting process. My mug was 9cm high and 25.5cm in diameter, so I multiplied those dimensions by 0.75 to allow for 25% shrinkage. Using large comedy needles (9mm) and two strands of wool (it has to be 100% non machine-washable wool) of different colours held together, I cast on 49 stitches and knitted a tiny little hat – the first three rows in garter stitch, and then 19 rows of stocking stitch for anyone misguided enough to actually be following these instructions. I then reduced as for the hat pattern until I had 7 stitches left, and sewed up the bottom of the mug cosy, to the point where the handle starts. I also sewed up the top three rows just to hold it together while I tried to make it mug shaped

The first attempt didn’t really shrink it at all width ways, although it did get shorter, and chucking it in the drier didn’t help much either. At this point it looked ridiculous, and I began to wonder whether any of my friends had any really small babies whose heads they wanted keeping warm. But I persisted with the felting and alternately plunging it in ice water, boiling it and taking it out and rubbing it in the direction I wanted it to shrink did, though. After about five repetitions of this I had something that had shrunk down to more or less the right dimensions. After one more half-hour stint in the drier, it was warm, still damp, and more or less the right size. I then put it on the mug and sat it on the rayburn to dry in its final shape.

I then cut the stitches that were holding the top band together and tried to work out where to put the poppers (snap fasteners) so it could be put on and off the mug without stretching it over the handle. I thought this through really carefully, bearing in mind that the poppers had to meet face together with the brim rolled. Once I’d worked through all the possibilities I sewed the poppers on as firmly as I could. Then I realised I’d got the placement exactly wrong and re-fixed them in the right place:

Et voila. A mug cosy. We’ve noticed that, over time, the cosy starts to stretch a little and is looser than it originally was. Chucking it in the washing machine on a hot wash and tumble-drying it tends to sort this out. Take it out before it’s dry and reshape it on the mug.

So there you go. These knitting instruction thingies are quite tedious, aren’t they? Think what it was like to write it… anyway, have fun and if it all goes horribly wrong, don’t blame me.