Liberty Betsy Rabbit Egg Cosy

I just fell down a massive rabbit hole, which seems apt considering this post is about rabbits.

I was looking for past images of egg cosies and I got sucked into looking at my life over the past 14 years in blog and shop photos. As I write (or used to, anyway) two blogs, one for sewing and one for gardening/cooking, it was a full-on nostalgia trip of how the house and garden used to look (tidy and new! I had so much more time for them than I do these days), how cute the boys once were and loads of sewing designs I’d forgotten about.

Anyhow, sorry, back to the point.

Cosies were one of the very first things that I made and although in truth they don’t sell brilliantly consistently, the woodland linen rabbit ones (the third incarnation, after brown mice and the original trio above) have been one of the most popular magazine requests of all my work, including getting into the hallowed pages of Country Living, and every Easter, there is a flurry of sales. It’s interesting, when we were kids we were always served our dippy eggs covered in a cosy but I never think to do the same when making eggs myself.

I had started a batch some time ago using a really pretty grey/blue Liberty Tana Lawn in the Betsy print but I got obsessed by the idea of using coral pink ric-rac which I simply haven’t been able to source, not in 100% cotton anyway. Then last week, in an attempt to close up some project boxes (I keep all of my work stacked in Ikea see-through A4 boxes and there are a LOT of them at the moment), I relented and used some blue polyester ric-rac from my old stash. I don’t think anyone buying one of the cosies cares if the trim is 100% cotton or not and the blue looks really pretty, in fact probably better than pink would have.

They started off really quick and I wondered why I don’t make them more often, then I got to the ears – the bl*@dy ears!! What a nightmare they are to get even, they tend to head off at jaunty angles no matter what you do so I end up unpicking and re-sewing them a number of times. The ric-rac also doesn’t always match at the sides no matter how careful I am, but I’ve had to suck that one up and remember that they are handmade and should look so (in a professional kind of way, if you know what I mean).

I really struggle to purposefully stitch the arms to look like they’ve been ‘sketched’, which is how I want them to look, as my instinct is to stitch the second line exactly on top of the first, I have to make them a bit wobbly on purpose which kind of triggers me a bit!

They are done and a final batch of red ric-rac ones are on the way (to use up my final length of it) and then I might really retire the design and move on.

You can find them here.

No idea what’s next, it’s half term and I always find it difficult to work with the boys in the house so I hope to address some of the hand-sewing in more unfinished project boxes as one of the boys has taken over my workbench for Art homework. For now, back to old photos and admiring how my garden used to look!