Winter Wonderland Coffee Cup Cozy

Protect your hands from hot coffee cups and be eco-conscious with a delightful felt coffee cup cozy! 

Supplies:

• Sheets of felt in colors of your choosing

• An embroidery needle

• Embroidery floss

• A cardboard coffee cup sleeve or template to trace

• Tailor’s chalk, pencil, marker, or sharpie

• Fabric pins (optional but recommended)

• Glitter, sequins, other decorations (optional)

• Fabric glue (optional)

Instructions:

1. First, unfold a (clean) cardboard coffee cup sleeve from any cafe to trace onto your felt. If you want a thicker coffee sleeve, I’d recommend tracing two so that you can layer them together later. Then you can also either print and cut out some snowflakes and other shapes to trace onto your felt, or you can draw some yourself if you feel confident in your drawing abilities! 

2. Cut out all of your pattern pieces from the felt - you’ll need at least one cutout of the coffee cup sleeve, though you can use two for extra padding and warmth.

3. Once all your fabric pieces have been cut out, it can be helpful to pin them together how you want them before you start sewing or gluing so that you know exactly how it’ll look before potentially making any mistakes that can’t easily be fixed. However, if you’re a fellow agent of chaos like myself, feel free to skip this step and continue onto #4.

4. Begin sewing or gluing! It generally works best to add the decorations first before connecting the ends together to make it circular, but you can work in any order that you’d like to. When connecting the ends of your sleeve together, it helps to measure it around a coffee cup to see how wide or narrow you want the opening to be before sewing or gluing it together.

5. If you’ve glued your sleeve together, you’ll want to wait at least a few hours to allow the glue to dry before use, but if you’ve sewn it together, you can begin using it to enjoy hot beverages immediately!

Tips:

• Sewing is going to be more secure than gluing, depending upon which glue you might use. But if you prefer gluing everything, I’d highly suggest using fabric glue, since that’s going to hold everything together a bit better than any other kind of glue. Don't use hot glue, as that may melt as the sleeve warms up from the coffee.

• When tracing your pattern, the best thing to use is tailor’s chalk, but pencils or washable markers work well too! If you don’t care about having black marks on your felt, you can also use a Sharpie or pen.

• In step 4, If you’re planning on sewing everything and using 2 layers of felt for the sleeve, you’ll want to sew those 2 pieces together last and sew on your decorations to the top layer first. That way the messier back side will be hidden between the 2 layers of felt. So, first decorate the front layer, stitch both layers together, and then sew the ends together.

• If you need to wash your coffee cozy, the best way to do so is with dish soap or gentle laundry soap and wash it by hand. Then you can pat it dry with some towels, reform it into a circle, and leave it out for a few hours to fully dry.