The vault of shame strikes again. A tea cosy, long promised to Krista who loves bees. I made the chart, as best I could, from a picture of… a bee. And filled in behind with honeycomb. And of course there’s skepness.

Bottom and top worked in the round. “Sides” worked flat on straights. Since teapots don’t have fingers I’ve been able to leave long floats. Stranding while knitting backwards totally rocks!

I don’t actually own a teapot so the part-finished version is modelled on our pottery money jar, the finished (blocking) version on the top part of a vacuum coffee maker.

Audiobooks: While making this I finished listening to the fifth in the DI Malin Fors series by Swedish writer Mons Kallentoft. I came to loath the series as it went on and the fifth was the worst. I found the books endlessly repetitive and riddled with factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies. And, ultimately, just plain boring. His major stylistic device, the talking dead, manages to be nauseatingly twee. This is counterpointed against the endless parade of explicit extreme torture and sexual and psychological violence against women and children layered with “oh dear this shouldn’t happen” pseudo justification. This latter trope is of course soooo old and tired. And the fourth book… the central evil character is called Josef Kurtzon, his son Leopold. Wait for it, wait for it… could we be headed towards… the heart of darkness? Um… no. No we could not. There are more in the series. I shan’t be listening to them. And for someone who perseveres with all sorts of crap, that’s pretty much a first.