Iron Craft - Week 4

I'm back from vacation and back to work. After sifting through a sea of endless emails it was nice to set aside a little crafting time on Monday night to unwind. The project, the iron craft challenge of the week "make a coffee cozy". Once again I strayed outside of the parameters a bit, although not quite as far as I did for the draft dodger challenge. Guilt set in when I saw the Iron Craft post on Wednesday which included the following:

" Please embrace the week's challenge. You are welcome to think outside of the box & make the challenge fit your skills & interests but if we ask you to make a scarf & you bake cookies well that's not embracing the challenge is it? Let's face it every challenge is not going to be a perfect fit for everyone but we look at Iron Craft as a change to stretch our crafting wings, a chance to try & learn new things."

Um yeah, I think they were referring to me. So this week I created two items in response to the challenge. One inside the box and one slightly outside. Let's start outside and work our way in. I embraced this as a beverage cozy challenge and started thinking about my own beverage needs. I immediately thought of my metal water bottles and how cold they are to hold and how annoying it is when they "sweat". So I whipped up a little sleeve/bag to hold my bottle (I'll post the instructions tomorrow) and keep my hands from getting wet and/or cold .

Now for the in the box idea. I made my coffee cozy out of cork contact paper and felt. I had both on hand from another project and thought the insulating properties of cork would be perfect for the challenge. I used a Starbucks cardboard cozy as a template, added a scalloped edge, used a hole punch so that some of the red felt could been seen under the cork, and added a button and elastic to hold it together (instructions also to be posted tomorrow).

With the exception of the first challenge, so far I have felt like the Iron Craft challenges have been a bit too specific (make a draft dodger, make bunting, make a coffee cozy). I hope they get more challenging. Even if they don't I'll continue to challenge myself to create something unique every week.