The new Chocolate Orange Cosy – Polar Bear and Penguin

Last Christmas one of my favourite festive pastimes was creating the Christmas Pudding Chocolate Orange cosy. I have no idea how many I made, but we may well be into double figures. You can look at my blog post from last year if this festive chocolate British tradition has past you by. This year, once I had finished my November commissions, I have set to with my homemade present making. These little bits of crochet nonsense are the perfect teacher/thank you gift.

As is often the way, Little B provides new inspiration. It was he who chose the cosy for his school end of term gifs, but asked if I could design a Penguin for one of his teachers who shares his passion for these cute birds. Brilliant. I knew I had seen something similar on the web and remembered the fabulous apple cosies by Kate at Just Pootling. These gorgeous patterns are available for free from LoveCrochet.

I altered the pattern to suit my original design but Kate’s version would work equally well. Not content with one Christmas character I moved on to creating a Polar Bear – he is quite sweet.  The only downside is there might be a bit of production line forming with my own 9 year old son playing factory foreman. But isn’t one of the joys of the Christmas season being able to create together – Son with the inspiration, Mummy doing the manual labour. Priceless.