Just finished putting together a tea cozy after stitching it twice. The lesson here is to double check the count of your gauze, as it may not be the size it's labeled to be! After stitching the front, and being unable to find a backing fabric that was the right color and thickness, I decided to stitch a back. I quickly stitched it up, but when I went to sew the front to the back, they were different sizes! Well, since the back was larger than the front, I experimented thinking I might be able to trim the excess off the back. Nope. Then in the process of ripping out the stitching, I cut both the front and the back. Sooooo, back to the drawing board, stitching both pieces on the same piece of gauze. One important note - since silk gauze is not exactly even weave, it is important to orient front and back in the same direction (parallel rather than perpendicular to each other).
Here is the finished tea cozy. The back is plain yellow with the scalloped blue border at the bottom. The blue splotch above the border on the back is really my initials. I can't get a good picture to save my life - my camera used to take wonderful mini pics, but it's become crotchety in its old age. If anyone has suggestions for a new camera, I'm interested! This one is a Fugi Fine Pix, and won't work with Windows 7, another reason to get a new one. Downloading pics onto my old slow desktop and transferring to the new laptop is not worth the effort for such poor results.
The tea cozy, when stitched on 48 count silk gauze, is a perfect fit for a Christopher Whitford 1:12 scale teapot. This one is the Blue Net Lomonosov pattern. It also works well on the slightly smaller pottery teapot I have that was made by Jane Graber. Her tea pot is about the same height, but smaller around.
