Hot Water Bottle Cozy Knitting Patterns

When it’s cold outside I want to do everything I can to make myself a little more cozy. So far that has not resulted in me carrying a hot water bottle everywhere I go, but every year I’m a little more convinced that might be a smart option. If for no other reason than it opens up a new genre of knitting for me. Check out these cute and easy to knit hot water bottle cozy knitting patterns.

Just about as easy as you can get is this garter stitch hot water bottle holder from Thistle and Twig Crafts. It’s worked in worsted weight or chunky yarn (worsted weight yarn is held double) and knit on straight needles. It’s a great use for a couple of fun buttons, too.

Use leftover sock yarn to make a great little cozy for your hot water bottle with this pattern from Lavender Kato. It comes in two sizes for one or two liter bottles, and you can use whatever sock yarn you have on hand to make it solid, striped or wild. (They also have a DK weight version if you’d rather.)

Speaking of leftover sock yarn, Sue McRae has a free pattern on Ravelry that uses leftover sock yarn to make mitered squares that are turned into a hot water bottl cozy. This one will definitely make you smile on a cold and dreary day!

Add stripes and a bit of optional holiday flair to your hot water bottle with this design from Lauren Ashton Designs. It uses super bulky yarn and has a fun little collar and pompoms to close up the top, but you could use a plainer finish if you like. You can find the pattern on Ravelry.

Or make funkier stripes with the Ziggy hot water bottle cover from Zoe Johnson, which uses three colors of DK weight yarn and an easy zig zag pattern. It’s worked in the round from the bottom up and the colorwork is charted but also includes written instructions. Find the pattern on Ravelry.

The main reason I wanted to write about hot water bottle covers was because of this one, called Snowfall Town. Designed by Season Qian, it uses two strands of fingering weight yarn held together (or use a DK weight on its own) and is worked form the bottom up in a charted stranded colorwork pattern. It might look complex but this is a pretty easy stranded knitting pattern that would be lovely to cozy up with all winter long. Grab a copy on Ravelry.

If you need more help getting cozy for the winter, check out this post I wrote earlier in the year about things you can knit to make winter better.

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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