A knitted hot water bottle cover...

...and the further perils of cheap craft kits.

I should have learned my lesson when it comes to skimping on craft supplies (like cheap Hama beads) but I was tempted early this year in the after Christmas sales, and I picked up a knitted hot water bottle cover craft kit in The Works. Harry always sleeps with his mini hot water bottle, even through the summer, and Mia had started wondering why she didn't have one. The main reason that I picked up the kit was because it contained the hot water bottle as well as the pattern and yarns to knit a cover for it.

As you can see from the picture, I ventured off plan a little bit. The original colours in the kit were red and green, but I decided to use some of my own purple yarn instead with the red, as I didn't really like the red/green contrast.

I do have trouble with knitting patterns so it's probably unfair to blame the kit completely, but I was very careful about following the pattern for the first few rows at least, so I'm not sure why the direction of stitches reversed a few rows in. I do quite like the contrasting stripe across the bottom of the cover though, I think it adds a bit of interest. After knitting the main body of the cover the rest of the pattern didn't make a great deal of sense to me, so I kind of made it up as I went along. My version of the hot water bottle cover knitting pattern goes something like - knit in stocking stitch (if you can) for the height of the hot water bottle, decrease for a few rows, then do ribbing for a bit, making the ribbing twice as high as the funnel bit on the hot water bottle so that you can fold it over on itself. Sew it all up, leaving the top open so that you can insert the hot water bottle.

The red wool ran out about two thirds of the way up the back of the cover so I just finished it off in the purple. That meant that I didn't have enough red wool to sew up the edges so I used purple, but luckily that doesn't seem to be noticeable. The kit then called for a white crochet snowflake motif to decorate the front. The crochet instructions made no sense to me whatsoever, so instead I cut out a pink heart from felt and sewed it to the front, much nicer anyway for a year round accessory.

It isn't the most accomplished piece of knitting but I think that it looks quite sweet, and Mia was very happy with it! That's another project ticked off my list of unfinished craft projects.

And despite my limitations when it comes to crochet I'm planning on beginning a new crochet project soon in association with Coats Crafts. I'll be sharing my progress across social media over the next few months, so keep an eye out so that you can follow along with my progress!