This tea cozy was inspired by the hero of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. It’s a bachelor-style tea cozy (meaning that you can add tea and pour cup after cup and possibly even rinse it out and make more tea all without having to take the tea cozy off your teapot, because bachelor’s can’t be bothered, or so the thinking goes) for Hobbiton’s favorite bachelor, with a pretty cable heart motif in plain wool. It’s the sort of thing that would fit in perfectly with the simple, attractive décor of a warm and comfortable hobbit hole, and it will keep your tea warm for about 3-4 hours. The sides are steeked, so it can fit any style or shape of tea pot and because steeking takes a bit of bravery and Bilbo is, in the immortal words of Leonard Nimoy, “the bravest little hobbit of them all”.

If you are not so sure of your bravery, there are instructions for working it flat, but this is also the perfect project for a first-time steek-er. Not only do the recommended yarns stick together marvelously, cushioning any error (when beta-testing this pattern I myself screwed up one side royally, but the yarn held together so well that I had time to fix it with no damage done), but it is a much quicker and easier knit than, say, a complex Norwegian sweater in DK wool, so if you should happen to make a mistake that can’t be fixed (unlikely with such forgiving yarn), it is much less horrifying.
This pattern will fit most 6-Cup teapots snugly and 4-cup teapots loosely.

Erratta: there should be a Purl 3 on rows 8& 10 of stitches 16-18