Back to school

In this climate many kids go to school with their own drink bottle, ready to fill it up with water regularly to avoid dehydration. The best bottles (in my humble opinion!) are made of stainless steel which means that they don't leach nasty phthalates or degrade quickly or sit in landfill sites for a few hundred years! Unfortunately they aren't insulated and usually the necks aren't wide enough to fill with icecubes and you can't put them in the freezer... so what you need is an insulated bottle cover.

First find a wool blazer (I got mine in the second-hand store), then shrink it in a really hot wash to felt the fibres. Then cut both sleeves off and put one inside the other (right side out). Pull the wrist end of each sleeve together and stitch firmly to form a base, then over-sew one top edge over the other top edge to hide the raw edges and create the top of bottle cover. I slipped elastic into the top seam and tightened it a bit: enough to stop the cover slipping off the bottle in darling daughter's school bag but not enough to prevent the bottle being removed for washing. Then I embroidered her name on it.