My Finished Hot Water Bottle Cozy- Version 1

Hi everyone! After the fiasco of using a knitting pattern to make a hot water bottle cozy, I decided to try to invent my own knitting pattern. I felt confident to make one free hand (Without planning out the pattern before I started to knit) so I took the yarn I used to make the original cozy and began to work on it again.

This new version, which I call version 1, does fit, but there are things I wanted to change before I was finally satisfied with the way the pattern is. I changed everything I didn’t like for version 2, which ended up turning out so well, it was the last version I knitted. I’ll talk about version 2 in a future post.

Here is what version 1 looks like without a water bottle in it…

Here is a close up of the bottom of the cozy from the front…

And the bottom from the back of the cozy…

This cozy has worked out very well. It fits the hot water bottle I own and works as a great cozy. I created the cozy by using the original pattern as a reference. I started by casting on the amount of bottom stitches the pattern called for, then increased the bottom of cozy until it was the right size for the hot water bottle to fit inside of it. Once I finished that, I began to knit the rest of the body with the decorative cable knit design on the front and ribbed knit on the back. The neck of the cozy was worked similarly to the way the original pattern called for. The difference is I needed to decrease more stitches than the original pattern called for. I also shortened the neck’s length.

The only issue I have with this version of the cozy is the bottom. When I tried to increase the bottom of the cozy to fit the hot water bottle, I used a normal stockinette stitch. I wanted to do this in order to see how well the cozy is coming together and what I need to change. Once I finished this section, I began to work with a ribbed knit stitch. This made the bottom look obviously different than the rest of the body. Even though I needed to do this in order to figure out how to make the cozy freehand and what needs to be changed, I want to use a ribbed knit all over the body for my next cozy. I will talk about it in a future post.

Well, that’s all for now! Thank you for reading!