Tea Cosies

Hello, and welcome to my Cosie page!! This is a brief history of how I came to be hooked on making and selling tea cosies, along with lots of pics.


Back in 2010 I made a fancy tea cosie to be auctioned for a fundraiser at Winchester Cathedral where I work. It was quite a job designing and making it to fit the tea pot I was provided with but it looked fab when finished and sold for £65!!

At about the same time the daughter of my good friend Chris had a stall at the Art Market on the High Street once a month. This is Chris with the Baby Birds Cosie I made her -

Chris suggested that perhaps I might like to make some more and have a table on the stall to sell them. That was the start of an obsession to design and make them that lasted a good 18 months! I even persuaded family and friends to make cosies for me...

I was forever looking for ideas, patterns and wool - along with charity shop tea pots. One lady at the art market ended up not only buying 5 cosies but also started "supplying" me with tea pots to put them on!


When I finally sickened grew tired of cosies, I moved onto making all sorts of things (allsorts - fancy that!) from fabric and wool and carried on for another 18 months.
All the money I raised was donated to various charities, totalling around £3,000.

Here are some photos of just a few cosies. Many I designed myself but where I used a pattern, I've tried to include a link.


First up, a Marie Curie special from a free pattern by Loani Prior.

This Marie Curie Daffodil Cosie was made as a raffle
prize for the launch of their campaign in 2013

This is a Meercat Coke Can Cosie, made for another friend - well she doesn't drink tea, only coke!

There was a small opening at the back of his neck for a straw so you didn't have to take the cosie off the can to drink. I did wonder how easy it was to pick up though...

This is one of my favourite cosies and one I designed myself too. A nest full of baby birds. I made different "species" of birds too. Or I said they were certain species depending on the colour of wool I had used - there were blue tits, sparrows and black birds.

I thought it might look quite cute to have a chick hatching out of an egg. It sort of did until you noticed the egg cup. That made it look a bit gruesome!!







Chickens were also a theme that I kept returning to. Not just tea cosies but also a paperweight and a doorstop...

A friend gave me some orange wool and it seemed a shame not to use it...It took ages to design this one, never mind make it! I sold it to a couple of students who screamed when they saw it!!!

I made Gromit from a pattern by Rian Anderson  - find it HERE

Naturally, Gromit was quite popular, so I made him again. And again...

I also branched out into a handful of sheep mug cosies - my own design

I made several elephants - they all had their own name of course. Buggered if I can remember what this chap was called though...I used a pattern by Debi Birkin, available HERE. I made some minor alterations, like flowers in the grass, ridges on the trunk. Oh. and I left out her little indian boy.

One of the tea pots I was given, had straight side and a flat lid. I thought it might be rather fun to have a go at making a castle cosie to fit it. Then I added a drawbridge and a knight, then Rapunzle - although she didn't quite work!! It took forever...

This Honeypot was a made to measure affair for a 1920's style teapot in a rather nasty mustard colour. Again, this one took a long time as their was so much work involved. I was very pleased with how it turned out though.

I'd met a lady from Edinburgh Zoo who worked with the Gentoo Penguins. She'd asked if I could design and make one for her. This chap was my first go - a sort of dry run.

And this is Gerald, complete with 2 chicks!

The chicks turned out very cute!! 

When I first started making cosies to sell at the Art Market, I asked for help so I'd have enough. Some friends helped and a couple of the volunteers in the cafe at work. There was also a lady called Jenny, although how she heard about it escapes me. She made me 2 and this is one of them - Freddo Frog. He looks rather good doesn't he??

The grassy hill with rabbits popping out was quite popular and I think between us we made 4 of these cosies. This is another Debi Birkin design.

I'd had so much fun making the first castle with it's drawbridge and knight that I made another. The teapot wasn't as nice though. And I left out Rapunzle on this one too!

But one of my absolute favourites was this beauty - I called her the Green Goddess. Although in the end I changed her name to Green Tea as she hadn't sold. I thought a change of name might help. So did reducing the price!

I'd been given the most beautiful delicate "elfin" tea pot with a pointed hat. That meant I had to have an open top and it had a pearl button fastening above the handle - without that, there's no way you'd have got it on and off. I thought she was fabulous and if I was a tea drinker I would have kept her and used her (I'm not - I absolutely HATE tea!!). And I had great fun designing her too.

June 2017

It's been quite a while since I made a knitted tea cosie, fun though they were. As you might have guessed from elsewhere on my blog, my current passion is crochet. I recently saw an article in Crochet Now magazine to make a tea cosie to enter into a competition as part of Marie Curie's Blooming Great Tea Party launch. And I thought I'd have a go. I've never crocheted a tea cosie before.....

I had some vague ideas and talked them over with the girls at work until I had something more concrete in my head. Here she is with the magazine article as I made a start -

(I did take some "in progress" shots but can't for the life of me find them at the moment!)

July 2017

I won the Runner Up prize!!  Woo Hoo!!! Here are some pics of my cosie, plus the winning design in the August magazine - 

I'm really not surprised I didn't win - and I never actually expected to - just look at the winning entry!! Absolutely amazing!!! The mag editor said they're going to run a CAL on their blog, so go and have a look if you want to make your own.