Koozies and coffee sleeves

Here are a bunch more koozies and coffee sleeves I made a while ago and never posted.  The coffee sleeves are all hand-spun wool.  The blue one is dyed with food coloring, the other two are natural wool color.

Baa Baa Black Sheep

I found out that one of the summer students working in our lab grew up on a sheep farm.  She was going home one weekend, so I asked her if they had any black, grey or other colored wool that I could buy.  She brought me back an entire garbage bag full of black and grey wool (for free!)!

Here it is before any washing.

Here are some clean, carded rolags ready for spinning.  The white is from my other fleece that my dad got me, and the lightest grey is a blend of the white and the lightest grey.  The other 3 shades of grey and black are all from this fleece.  

I spun the different colored rolags in the order they were in the picture and then plied it back on itself to make this skein that goes from black all the way to white.

 This one was actually my first skein of spun yarn from the black and grey fleece.

And, here is a coffee cozy knit from the first skein.  This might have to go to the summer student as a thank you for the wool.  I can't wait to make something from the other skein. I've carded a lot more of this wool in preparation for my new spinning wheel, so there might be enough for a scarf or something when I am done!

Hand spun, hand dyed, and hand knit coffee cozy

Back in November I took a small amount of yarn I had spun (double ply on the top and a singles on the bottom of the picture below) and dyed it with food coloring.  It has been sitting on my shelf since then and I had no specific plans for it.  I had just done it to try out dying.

The color was so bright that I couldn't imagine wanting to make anything out of it. In fact, it is even hard to get a good picture!

Well, this weekend I finally got around to knitting up a coffee cozy with the singles yarn.  It seems like the only thing that you might not mind being that crazy color.  It looks better than I expected.  I actually kind of like it now.  I'm considering putting it up on etsy.

Felted coffee cozy

I crocheted this coffee cup cozy from wool yarn and washed and dried it to felt it. Now it works great as a replacement for those cardboard ones that you get at the coffee shop. I need to make a couple more to work out the pattern. This is actually not my first attempt at this. I made one about a year ago that was much too large, thinking it would shrink a lot when I washed it, but it didn't. Then I started making a second one, but made too many increases too early so it was okay at the bottom, but huge at the top. This one is about the right size, so I'll have to see if I can replicate it!