Welcome to my Cozy Corner! Pull up a seat and let’s have a nice cuppa and chat for a while. My Gran used to call that a coze .. that sitting together and the sense of togetherness it engenders. I look at my dictionary and find COZY defined meaning warm and safe and protected and cared for and cossetted .. all ways I want my friends and family to be.
We’re going to have LOTS of projects here in the Cozy Corner. To be terribly predictable .. yes, the first ones ARE tea cozies. Good tea is too wonderful to allow to get cold.That brings out the tannins and makes it bitter and nasty. Good tea, like good friends, needs warmth and protection. (It also needs something good to nibble on with .. and those are at the end of this article for you, too.)
Since we’re fast approaching St Pat’s .. I’ve designed a cozy with a traditional Irish Harp. But the Celts didn’t stay only in Ireland .. those rascals went all over the Isles and indeed all over the world. In my own background, me granmither’s people came from Ireland, and my granfaaaaather’s came from Scotland. I didn’t want to leave either out! So the second design for this month is for an equally traditional Scot’s Thistle.
These are given to you in the form of charts, which I’ve hand-drawn on knitting graph paper. If you recharted them on regular graph paper, they’d look all funny and smooshey .. because the proportions would be badly skewed. This is because in knitting, the stitches are WIDER than they are tall. Knitting graph paper takes this looking-cockeyed-challenge away and is both readily available to print for yourself online www.tata-tatao.to/knit/matrix/e-index.html or in a neatly preprinted pad from that nice Meg at School Press online (www.Schoolhousepress.com)
Please take a look at the knitted up samples. The light green one is the medium sized cozy on a 4 cup pot. It was made by using the chart to knit the design in simple k & p stitches on a st stitch background. That’s what many of us use for the much-beloved cloths we like to make. But these charts are more versatile than that. The cream and varigated cozy is the small one on a 2 cup pot. I used the same chart but worked it in intarsia, using strands of the varigated cut into lengths to get the exact color match. The same design could be duplicate stitched .. it could be cross stitched .. it could be transposed into crewel embroidery techniques and be just as effective.
There is versatility in charts. Please do NOT look at any of my patterns as precise and engraved in marble. ALWAYS feel free to adapt, personalize, tweak the designs to make them work for YOUR purpose.
Isn’t that the whole idea? To create something that is OURS, that we put ourselves in .. that we can either use with pride in our own homes .. or give with love to others to have in theirs.
In coming months, I have lots of ideas and concepts to explore with you here. I hope you’ll come back to join me in my Cozy corner!
Warm hugs,
Maggie & Ruby C
Knitting contentedly in the Corner
We’re going to have LOTS of projects here in the Cozy Corner. To be terribly predictable .. yes, the first ones ARE tea cozies. Good tea is too wonderful to allow to get cold.That brings out the tannins and makes it bitter and nasty. Good tea, like good friends, needs warmth and protection. (It also needs something good to nibble on with .. and those are at the end of this article for you, too.)
Since we’re fast approaching St Pat’s .. I’ve designed a cozy with a traditional Irish Harp. But the Celts didn’t stay only in Ireland .. those rascals went all over the Isles and indeed all over the world. In my own background, me granmither’s people came from Ireland, and my granfaaaaather’s came from Scotland. I didn’t want to leave either out! So the second design for this month is for an equally traditional Scot’s Thistle.
These are given to you in the form of charts, which I’ve hand-drawn on knitting graph paper. If you recharted them on regular graph paper, they’d look all funny and smooshey .. because the proportions would be badly skewed. This is because in knitting, the stitches are WIDER than they are tall. Knitting graph paper takes this looking-cockeyed-challenge away and is both readily available to print for yourself online www.tata-tatao.to/knit/matrix/e-index.html or in a neatly preprinted pad from that nice Meg at School Press online (www.Schoolhousepress.com)
Please take a look at the knitted up samples. The light green one is the medium sized cozy on a 4 cup pot. It was made by using the chart to knit the design in simple k & p stitches on a st stitch background. That’s what many of us use for the much-beloved cloths we like to make. But these charts are more versatile than that. The cream and varigated cozy is the small one on a 2 cup pot. I used the same chart but worked it in intarsia, using strands of the varigated cut into lengths to get the exact color match. The same design could be duplicate stitched .. it could be cross stitched .. it could be transposed into crewel embroidery techniques and be just as effective.
There is versatility in charts. Please do NOT look at any of my patterns as precise and engraved in marble. ALWAYS feel free to adapt, personalize, tweak the designs to make them work for YOUR purpose.
Isn’t that the whole idea? To create something that is OURS, that we put ourselves in .. that we can either use with pride in our own homes .. or give with love to others to have in theirs.
In coming months, I have lots of ideas and concepts to explore with you here. I hope you’ll come back to join me in my Cozy corner!
Warm hugs,
Maggie & Ruby C
Knitting contentedly in the Corner