Making Good Use: 15 Minute Tea Cosy

P has become very enamoured of having his tea from a tea pot - with cosy - these past few months. He's not keen on the usual English cup of 'Rosie Lee' - a nice dark brown brew with milk, and possibly sugar, drunk piping hot - even in a heatwave. He's much more into Rooibos or fruit teas, left in the pot for hours on end while he drinks his way through it. Personally, I can think of nothing worse than luke-warm tea but P - being from the Continent - is quite happy to drink tea from fairly warm right through to horribly tepid - yuk!! He even extols the virtue of 'iced tea' which, to my English tastes, sounds like it could well be the work of the devil!!!!

Anyway, he's been thinking about taking a tea pot and cosy to work with him - providing we can find a suitable tea pot somewhere second-hand. I fortuitously found this tutorial over at Wise Craft to make a reversible padded tea cosy.

Using my 25-year-old Kaffe Fassett tea cosy as a template. (What a marvellous item, it may be a little tea-stained in places but still keeps the tea pot lovely and warm even aftef all these years.)

I came up with this prototype from bits and bobs of fabric I had knocking about. The outside is made from the remnants of a 1970s tablecloth

The inside from some bright and breezy Ikea fabric I found at a boot sale. Perversely enough, I prefer the Ikea fabric side much more than the 70s fabric, though that is supposed to be the lining fabric. I used two layers of quilt batting as the padding in the middle. The whole lot must have taken me 15 minutes or less to cut out and sew.

It's only a prototype and for P's cosy I'm thinking of using some of this fabric that Mum gave me for Christmas lined with the same Ikea fabric as the tea cosy above. Other alterations would be to put hanging tags on both sides (as was given in the original instructions) and to make the cosy less tall. Otherwise, all in all, I'm pretty pleased with my 15 minute effort.