I'm Also Knitting a Teapot

I'll have another whale update within the next couple of days, but in the meantime, here's another knitting project that I've been working on! It's a teapot.

I dyed all the wool for the teapot with natural dyes:

From left to right: indigo, cochineal and cream of tartar, lac, logwood

In addition to the colours in the picture above, I also used some undyed wool.

The teapot, although a relatively small and simple shape, was pretty exciting to knit. I designed the knitting pattern for it myself, which is something I've never done before (mostly, it was a lot of math). I also wanted my teapot to have a fair isle design going around the middle. Unable to decide whether I wanted the design to feature hearts or foxes, I chose both. Here's the design I came up with (it repeats once more, but the second time with two fox faces on top and one on bottom):

And here's some colour sampling that I did:

I spent about three days asking everyone I spoke to whether the preferred the red foxes or the purple-y foxes (I ended up going with the purple-y ones).

This is right after I finished knitting the base of the teapot:

And these two shots were taken as I started knitting the body:

That braid you can see is called a Latvian Braid, and it's a really lovely technique that's super easy to do. This was my first time trying it, but you'd probably see it most often on mitten cuffs.

The fox/heart design around the middle ended up taking much longer to knit than I thought it would, but finally, I finished, and blocked the teapot body.

I blocked it on a glass jar that I taped some layers of folded up newspaper onto so that it would be a little more teapot-shaped, and not just cylindrical.

Before I can knit the lid onto it, I need to knit the handle and spout, and stuff it. Here, I just threw a bit of stuffing in there to see how it would look (it looked pretty cute):

And here I am knitting the handle. I'm knitting the handle in the round, and then poking a bit of stuffing in it to keep it nice and circular, and then I'll run a piece of wire through it so that when it's sewn onto the teapot body, I can shape it into a nice teapot handle shape.

I'll post another picture of the teapot up when it's all finished. And, if any of you blog-readers think you might like to knit a teapot of your own, I'm intending to make my knitting pattern available on Ravelry! (After I finish knitting this teapot and making a couple adjustments to the pattern.)