A Gentleman's Tea Cosy

Non-knitters, look away now.

So recently*, my cousin – having lured me deep into the knitting habit with ‘free’ supplies of wool – suggested that I might want to do him a favour in return for keeping the supplies coming: he had a teapot that he wanted cosied. Well, I thought, that’s easy enough. Everybody knows what a tea cosy looks like.

But there was a catch. Several catches. First, there was the teapot itself:

The problem

You will notice that it is not arranged along the traditional ‘here’s a little teapot short and stout’ lines, and its handle was in the wrong place for easy cosy-fitting. Not only that, but the tea cosy must emphatically not be ‘ironic’, in the modern sense of ‘ironic’, meaning ‘a bit crap’. It had to not just keep the tea hot, but it had to do so in an elegant and fitting way. Anything quilted, with ribbons, a bobble, or in the shape of a christmas pudding was therefore out and that pretty much eliminated the entire world’s stock of tea cosy knitting patterns.

So I had to improvise. For a while, the teapot sat in the kitchen while I mused upon possible solutions. Finally, I decided that – this being a gentleman’s tea pot – a gentlemanly tea cosy would be in order. I settled on a sort of tea-pot-cardigan, the sort that might be stretched over a portly torso, in a tweedy sort of brown and grey. The end result (after a couple of false starts) was this:

the solutuion

Knitting afficionados should note that this is in slip stitch with a moss-stitch button band and there’s no pattern and I’m buggered if I can remember exactly what I did, but it was pretty complicated. Spherical objects are tricky to knit cosies for, I tell you. Even harder than space invaders.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the horizontal line around the middle is what we call in the software trade ‘a feature’. And is nothing at all to do with me forgetting what colour I was on in the middle.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll go back to knitting hats.

*that’s recently in knitting time, ie. months and months and months ago. I knit very slowly. Those of you looking for Christmas presents are already too late, although I’m accepting suggestions for the 2010 season if you’re quick.

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