I happened on the November/December issue of Piecework not long ago, and quite fell in love with their colorwork tea cozy. Alas, after much poking through my stash, and realizing that the most suitable wool I have -- as it happens, the green and purple Queensland Rustic Merino Sport I was only recently using -- was not at all the right gauge, and that my 4-cup Brown Betty would clearly get lost in a cozy some 3+ inches bigger all over, I resigned myself to adding the colorwork cozy to my perpetual To-Do list. But I kept thinking about the skein each of Lamb's Pride Worsted and Brown Sheep Handpaint Originals I've had for yonks -- made a rather pretty pair of mittens out of them, worked alternated in a simple all-over check, but the mohair in the Handpaint especially was so scratchy, even on my fairly-durable hands, that I ripped them out and rewound the wool and put it away. Well, all of that wool and fuzz knitted together would be very well-insulating, though, wouldn't it ....
My cozy is a mash-up of a pattern by Keren from Tea by the Sea, which she worked up from an existing cozy knitted by her granny, and Paton's "classic cozy", which produces a very similar result. (If you have a slightly different gauge of yarn, or a different-sized pot, here is yet another version, also modeled on her grandmother's cozy, by Yasmin of Knit, Shear Bliss!.)
The stitch is theoretically easy, but a bit of a pain to work -- okay, it's a real pain -- you simply pull the floats snugly, to get the "pleated" effect. Paton's suggest drawing up each float to about an inch, but I found that after a few rows, everything relaxed so much that it just looked bumpy, not pleated, so I ended up pulling the floats quite tightly, and that combined with a tighter-than-usual gauge made the knitting a bit onerous. Luckily, there isn't really much of it, size-wise, so even feeling like I was working hard, it came together quickly.
These two yarns do not really go together, being a clearly-different gauge, but they were together in a bag I inherited fifth- or sixth-hand from a local yarn shop that had closed, and the colors are really made for each other (M23 Fuchsia and HP-50 English Garden respectively). With this particular stitch and at this gauge, you'd hardly know they are really like this! --
-- and it's a tea cozy, gauge schmage, eh?!
The texture on the back is really fascinating with those long, regular floats, and the color shifts are very pretty. The fabric is I kid you not about an inch thick (2.5 cm), so I expect my tea to stay quite warm.
Instead of a pompom, I knitted a piece of i-cord and made a sort of flower for the top.
So all in all, I'm quite pleased, and looking forward to a nice cup of tea!
