Tea Cozy Revolt

I've decided that I don't like the brioche stitch, and I do like making up my own patterns. So I'm frogging the brioche tea cozy and inventing my own. It is a coil of green I-cord, crocheted together in yellow.





Right now it just looks like a hat for a tea pot, but it's going to get bigger and cover the whole thing.

While I was dreaming up this idea, I made a cozy for a cup. I know it looks silly, but it's really quite functional. The cup doesn't insulate very well on it's own, so it's hard to hold with hot tea inside and the tea doesn't stay hot for very long. But it's a pretty cup, a gift from an old roommate, so I like to use it as much as I can.

Ravelry, Tea Cozy Troubles

My ravelry membership came through! So far all I've done is add a couple of projects and browse to see what other patterns are out there. I think it's awesome- so organized, so many members, so very detailed. My one problem is that for photos it interfaces with Flickr. I HATE Flickr and love Picasa. It's no wonder that Picasa is awesome, since everything Google touches turns to gold, but I wonder why other software never approaches Google's level of innovation. I use Picasa for this site, and for picture organization in general, so it just bothers me that I have to load my pictures to yet another piece of software in order to use them on Ravelry.

My primary project right now brioche stitch tea cozy. I'm really having trouble with it. This is my first attempt at knitting in the brioche style and multi-color projects generally don't work out well for me. Perhaps I should have taken some time to get the technique down before jumping right into the tea cozy. It also doesn't help that the pattern is written by a New Zealand knitter who uses different terms and abbreviations. For example, I think "yarn round needle" is the same as a yarn over, but I'm not really sure. After much yarn-wrestling I think I have the pattern down, but I neglected to contour the shape to fit my tea cozy. It fits a little too snugly around the spout.



I also knit a hat for Ben! It was much easier than the tea cozy. Here it is on a pumpkin.

I'm back!

School has been busy, but now that midterms are over I can return to the blag. I have quite a few finished objects. First, Tetris is finally done!

The pillows are really comfy, too. I'd say it is a success. Thanks to Steve for the idea.

I also knit a hat!

It was supposed to be for Ben. I bought the yarn because it's his favorite color- the color of the Baltimore Orioles and his high school football team. When the hat was finished, I realized that it was too feminine for him to wear but too cute to frog. So, it's mine.

Now I'm working on socks to give to Dad for Christmas.

The Dad socks are HUGE. The pattern calls for 44 stitches around, I used 60. The picture shows me wearing them over a normal-sized pair that I made for myself.

Coming up next will be a hat for Ben (for real this time) and a tea cozy. I'm thinking of using this tea cozy pattern, probably with yarn left over from Tetris.

Finally, here's a picture of the mini-rose plant in my kitchen. For a while I thought it was dead, but it came back!