The culprit? My Diet Coke. Normally I drink pop in cans, but at my work we are not allowed to have open containers of liquid near our workspace (I work with really old books and expensive computer equipment) and bottled drinks need to live on the floor. (I work in a very dark environment too… this will be important later!)

Well, I’m home today due to my bum knee acting up again, and am kind of stuck in my chair. I felt like crocheting something and the closest yarn to me was the Bernat Handicrafter Cotton I was using yesterday to make dishcloths. I had lots of odds and ends, especially of bright colours, and so my Diet Coke cozy was born:

With those crazy colours there’s no way my drink will get lost on the dark floor in the dim room!

The back:

The top:

At the top of the cozy I did a round of mesh, basically *dc, ch1 (skip a stitch)* repeat, to make holes to weave in a bit of a drawstring. The drawstring itself is mostly just 1 sc in each base chain, except on the ends I did 2 sc in each base chain, to add a bit of a twist.

The bottom:

The bottom is actually a circle (the shape of the bottom of the bottle makes it look a bit like a wonky-pentagon). 12 dc, followed by 24 dc, then a round of sc in the pattern of *sc, sc, 2sc* repeat

I tried to get a close up of the stitch pattern in this pic:

After a round of 1 dc per stitch in the base, I started a pattern of *dc sc* repeat, and in the following row *sc dc* repeat, so that sc goes into a dc and dc goes into a sc.

I made the mistake of measuring this as I went with a bottle of Diet Coke I was actually drinking, which means that the sides of the bottle were sweating, and it made the yarn wet every time. Crocheting with wet yarn kind of sucks! (Which, if you’ll recall, was one of the major motivators for making this project…). I finally got wise after a few rounds and found an empty bottle nearby (What? We’re in the middle of a garbage strike here. Of *course* there was an empty drink bottle next to my chair. lol)

Here it is empty:

I’m going to have to make another one of these, as I usually have two bottles with me. I’m thinking of doing some sort of spiral pattern…