My Grandma used to have a book entitled Happiness is a warm puppy. I never actually read it but I always thought it was a strange title. I'd be more inclined to say "Happiness is a hot water bottle"... except when you wake up in the morning and find a cold lump of rubber at your feet.
That's one reason why I decided to knit myself a hot water bottle cosy
(since my flat is fairly cold and I've been using my bottle a lot more lately).
The other reason is that I found a cool pattern for
one with a cable and was wanting to have a go at cabling. I started knitting
it about a week ago and finished yesterday evening. I knitted it using an
aran-weight wool/acrylic/nylon mix yarn in RAF blue colour (at least, that's
how it was described on the website I got it from - I would have thought RAF
blue would be a bit lighter, but I digress) on a circular needle (5mm x 40cm),
making this my second completed project on a circular needle. It's a very
straightforward pattern, being done mostly in stocking stitch, with a single
6-stitch right-twist cable running up it; the neck is done using 2x2 rib, and
is folded back on itself. Here's what mine looks like (with the bottle inside
it):
I had assumed that it would stop the bottle from being too hot when first filled and that even though the water would still go cold overnight the wool wouldn't feel as clammy against my feet as the bare rubber does when I wake up in the morning. I was right about my first assumption and pleasantly surprised to find that the water was still actually quite warm when I woke up this morning. Of course, that just made it all the harder to get out of my nice warm bed and face Monday morning!
My other main project at the moment is also a cosy, but this one is for my
teapot. I started it just over a month ago and initially found it quite
frustrating as I was knitting the two colours with yarn carried on both hands
and wasn't getting on too well with the left-hand method (used for the dark
yarn), especially for purling. By now, I'm much more used to that method -
indeed, I used it exclusively on my hot water bottle cosy - so work on the tea
cosy is a lot less onerous than it was. Yesterday was quite a good knitting
day for me, as I finished the first half of the tea cosy, as well as the bottle
cosy. Here's a picture of the tea cosy as it currently stands:
If you
follow that link to Flickr, you'll also be able to see a picture of the back of
it, as well as photos of my other knitting projects.
I haven't yet started on the other half of the tea cosy, but this evening I have cast on for my second attempt at mittens. I've previously mentioned that I was going to start a pair. And I did, a week or so back. Fairly soon, however, I realised that despite my careful gauge swatching, the cuff was turning out too big on the 4.5mm needles I was using, so I decided to start again on 4mm needles. Hopefully it won't take too lonk to find out whether that will do the trick. I'm fairly optimistic.
I don't think I got round to mentioning that I finished my top-down hat the other day too. Unfortunately my gauge was a bit off there too (possibly because I switched from RH to LH yarn technique partway through, which made the stitches a bit looser) and it came out a little bigger than intended. Not to worry, it was a good first exercise at using a circular needle and also means that I can feel justified in starting my next hat project soon - I have in mind a nice cabled hat pattern which I intend to knit using Alpaca yarn (which is supposed to be very soft and warm - ideal for a hat).
Tags: hat hotwaterbottle knitting teacosy
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