How-to: Thistle beer bottle cozy from sweaters

For my dad's birthday gift, I decided to try a beer bottle cozy decorated with a Scottish symbol of some kind. I'd seen several examples of these made out of felted sweaters (like this tutorial from instructables) and had been wanting to try it. I decided to decorate my dad's with a thistle, and after looking through various images I came up with a simple drawing of what I wanted to shoot for. Luckily I have been hoarding sweaters and I had the colors I needed already felted.

I only had to cut five separate pieces for the thistle and it didn't take very long.

The bottom of the flower part extended down into the green, which gave it a 3-dimensional effect. It also allowed me to attach the purple part at the same time as the top of the stem. I sewed through a total of four layers of fabric.

Then I sewed on the leaves.

I didn't actually stitch the purple part, except to add details with some purple embroidery thread. I thought the edges would look better loose.

Then the fun part was over and I had to figure out how to make it fit on a bottle. I used a very sophisticated method.

I rolled the top edge of the tube down twice and sewed that down, and before I tied it off I stretched the top just a bit to be sure it wouldn't be too tight to get the bottle in.

Then I sat the bottle on top of a piece of my fabric and cut a circle for the bottom, and sewed that on. Before I sewed too far, I matched the edges of the circle together with the edges of the tube just to be sure the bottom would go on smoothly and wouldn't end up being too big or too small.

The only thing left was to turn it right side out and see how it looked. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! I'm seriously thinking of trying a Celtic knot next time.