It's Tutorial Tuesday! Make an insulated water bottle cozy!

Did you know that wool is naturally insulated & moisture wicking? That's what makes recycled wool an excellent choice for water bottle cozies! Your water will stay cold, but your hands will stay warm. The texture of the wool helps you keep a better grip on your water bottle, and the condensation will be wicked away, so you won't be left with a soggy cozy. We've been using recycled wool cozies on out steel water bottles for a long time now, and can't live without them! Ready for the super easy tutorial?

Take a felted (not too felted, so there is a bit of stretch left to it) wool sweater sleeve, and place it on your bottle, to determine how long you want it to be. Mark it, take it off the bottom, and cut straight across. Don't follow the pattern of the sweater when you cut (if you are using a patterned sweater), because the patterns can run at a slight angle. Then cut a circle that is the same circumference as the bottom of your cut sweater sleeve bottom.


Now turn your sleeve part inside out, and place the circle on the cut end, wrong side out.


Now sew the circle to the sleeve.


It should look something like this when you are done...


Now flip it right side out, and you are done!


Now we are ready for summer!

P.s. These are washable too! I've washed my son's cozies a dozen times. Just wash on cold, so they don't felt further. I just threw them in cold cycles in the washer, but if you want to be extra careful, just hand wash cold and lay flat to dry.

It's What I've Been Working on Wednesday!

Well, since I created the guest tutorial for a play food cereal box this week, and I was working on next week's tutorial (can't show you yet!), I didn't have much more time for other sewing, but I made a couple of practical things this week. One night this week, I was really in the mood to sew something in one sitting, so I made my son another water bottle cozy.



And though it isn't made of wool, i'm still going to show you my fitted table cloth because i'm proud of it ;) . We have been worried about ruining our new kitchen table, and since all the place mats were too big for our table, so I needed table cloths. I looked in the thrift stores, and found nothing, and the ones I found new were just too expensive. I hit my fabric bin, and found this great vintage print fabric that I found at a garage sale a couple of years ago, that I love.



The biggest piece of it overhung the table by just a couple of inches, so it hung weird. I decided to turn it into a fitted table cloth & love how it turned out! I just made a hem, then zig zag (I've been using my zig zag a lot lately, haven't I?) stitched a piece of elastic to the edge.

(inside & outside of hem)

I stretched the elastic as I sewed, so when I was done it hugged the table top perfectly! The upside to the fitted tablecloth is that my wiggly 5 year boy is not making the table cloth move around at dinner time :) .



So what have you been working on? Please feel free to post your finished recycled wool projects on my Facebook page!