White horses tea cosy

I’m back to working on my C&G coursework now. The next assessment piece is to be a household item and the design is to be inspired by a landscape theme. I’ve decided to make a tea cosy. Our kitchen colour scheme is white and grey with blue – a blue kettle, a blue pepper mill, a blue and grey salt kettle. So the tea cosy should fit into this colour scheme. A seascape immediately came to mind as being appropriate. I grew up next to the sea and particularly like wild seas on a stormy day. When I was a child my sister painted a series of seascapes using the painting by numbers oil painting kits. One of the paintings was of a wild sea with white horses. I did a bit of googling and discovered the Guinness Advert of surfers and white horses from 1999. I had never seen it before (we left the UK in 1980) and was very taken with it. In Wikipedia I found out that the advert was inspired by Walter Crane’s Painting Neptune’s Horses. So that was another source of inspiration for my design too.

The cosy will be the classic shape for a tea cosy that completely covers the tea pot (I don’t like the ones that have the handle and spout sticking out). So it will be shaped like a slightly flattened half circle and have two distinct sides to it rather than being more of a cylinder shape. This being the result of intending to cover the handle and spout. I’ve sketched the design for both sides of the tea cosy:

I also did some experimenting with brown paper to be sure that the tea pot was going to fit in the cosy with enough ease to get it on and off without a fight, but to be a reasonably snug fit. I found this useful link on Rusty Bobbin’s web site, which helped with making the pattern.

And I’ve pulled out all the fabric and thread that I think I may use in the making. This photo showing about half of it