There's no black and no white

On a recent lunch date, my friend showed me some knitted tea cosies in a shop window. She *strongly admired* one in particular - and her birthday was coming up.

I took a quick dodgey picture through the window and used that as my reference. And after the cosy was given and duly admired, we strolled back to that shop to see it again. Turns out I chose a much brighter blue (which luckily she likes), Shepherd Colour4Me 8 ply. It's hard to tell in these photos, but the shop one was quite a pale blue, and the pink was actually fluorescent. Mine is just a strong hot pink, leftover from this blanket.

I looked at a couple of patterns to get the general idea and customised it to fit a standard 2-cup teapot. At first I wanted to knit in the round, but I realised that so much of the side has to be open that it makes more sense to knit it in two pieces, basically just rectangular, narrowing a bit at the top before the eyelets.

I was pleased to learn that I can whip up a tea cosy in a day. (A useful life skill, right?) This included making the flowers, though I did the sewing up later.

Finally, this is how the crochet flowers looked before I steam blocked them. I'm actually wondering if part of the reason I've given up too easily on crochet attempts is that it looked like a chaotic tangled mess, but actually just needed blocking. Though the bigger problem tends to be following the instructions while looking up what every stitch means, one by one.