If you make coffee or tea in a press, like the Bodum, you’ll probably experience this problem: how to keep it warm long enough. I’ve been wrapping mine up tightly with a tea towel, like my sister showed me. It just never stayed warm enough, and it was a bit fiddly getting the tea towel on.
There’s loads of ideas on Etsy, but I wanted something from felted wool. A trip to my local Value Village scored me a large, slightly moth eaten, woollen men’s sweater in neutral coffee tones. Unfortunately I don’t have a pic of it.
Several runs through a hot wash and dry produced a fairly decent felt, and the fun began. The first problem was how to handle holes in the fabric, but after a couple of weeks just letting it stew, I got the idea to make little patches and sew them on. The result was about half a dozen uniquely different cozies, and I even made some small ones for my single serve Bodum too.
It turned out that the back of the felted knit fabric, the garter stitch, was the most interesting.
They all close simply with a piece of velcro.
The edges are finished with a simple zigzag stitch, and some got a piece of the hem band. The patches are sewn on with a straight stitch, and initially I just added them to cover the holes but then added more to balance out the overall effect. That was the fun part!
I think next time I’ll try one with an added inner layer of wool, and maybe it would keep the coffee warm longer. At least with the knitted fabric it should be able to handle the curvature around the pot; the tough synthetic felt just didn’t work.
How do you keep your coffee/tea warm?
