Koala Tea Cosy
This little fella didn’t quite make it in time for the Fifties Fair last weekend, which is all the better really because now I get to keep him! He’s awfully cute, isn’t he? (Until you remember that he has a teapot up his bum, at which point it becomes disturbing.) The pattern is free online and purports to be from 1937. That might explain why I had so much difficulty following it. It reads like it’s supposed to have a picture, but since it doesn’t (except for a random illustration) you’re knitting blind most of the time. You also have to do weird things like knit the two body pieces sideways. Anyway, I had to change a few things: 1) The nose. The shape they give is just perplexing and it didn’t look at all like a real koala. So I went with more of an egg shape. 2) The neck. The opening at the top of the cosy is waaaay bigger than the head, so I had to cinch it up a lot. That’s why I knitted him a patriotic scarf to hide the ugly join. 3) There’s an error when you get to the second row of openings on the front. It should be on rows 67-68, not 66-67. Lastly, this makes for a pretty big tea cosy. I had to pad ours with a dishtowel just to get it to fill out his shape. Using 4ply and smaller needles would give you a smaller koala.
And that is IT for tea cosies for about the NEXT TEN YEARS!
3 responses
Nice work — reminds me of the old joke!
(The local specialty is a tea made by Koala bears with water from the Mersey River. It was quite good, but loaded with bits of hair and straw, because … the Koala tea of Mersey is not strained.)
When I was a child the way most people got from Wellington to Auckland was on an overnight train. It was famously uncomfortable and the ‘refreshments’ were equally famous for their terrible quality. The 6am stop was at a place called Mercer, where passeners were served stewed tea in thick white china from huge pots of Railway tea. A New Zealand poet was once famous for remarking in a radio interview “The squalid tea at Mercer is not strained.”
I’VE CREATED A MONSTER! (Referring to the puns, not my koala.)