The Best Part of Waking Up

(A side rant: I seriously wish there was another name for such things that keep other things warm...I hate cutesy sounding words like "coffee cozy," "hubby," "veggies," or "tutes." Foreals, we are big kids now ladies and can pronounce whole words.)

I made this french press cozy for my sister after we got them addicted to french press coffee at our place a while back. It makes such a rich cup, there's really no going back after you've become an addict of the stuff. She moved into a new place recently as well so it seemed like a good time to go with new colors—enter the grey and seafoam duo.

We went with Lizzie House's Pearl Bracelets and some tiny herringbone's from Riley Blake which paired up nice together I think. I designed the pattern for this myself and am thinking about getting it up on the blog as a tutorial with lots of good photos, if folks are interested. Tutorials can be quite labor intensive and require several good hours of daylight though so go easy on me.

It made sense to make it double-sided and quilted with cotton batting for insulation—practical and pretty, my favorite combination! Once that was settled, I promptly dug around in my button box and found some matching buttons, some vintage and some new.  The elastic ties can secure to either side in a non-obtrusive way and were a good way to fudge the fit a bit without having the real thing to take measurements off of.

 I love love love the way the quilted circiles came out, especially on they grey side.

The quilting was done by hand. I briefly thought about doing free-motion machine quilting but the unconnected circles would have required a lot of stopping and starting so doing it by hand was actually a lot quicker in this case. 

And last but not least (especially since it was actually the first step before the pieces could be assembled), in order to add a little something extra and personalize it, I did some embroidery to contrast on each side, riffing off the print and a reference to the Folger's theme song...as sung by the group Rockapella in the 90's (of Carmen San Diego fame) of course! Um, you're welcome for that.