Of Tea and Tea Cozies

My parents, both of whom worked shift work for years, have been ardent coffee drinkers for as long as I've known them.¹ Though I love the smell of coffee, I almost never drink it². Tea has always been my hot caffeinated beverage of choice. In my mother's family, it is customary to take tea after dinner, and being allowed to have tea after dinner waas a marker of being "grown up" for all of us grandchildren. After finishing the Girl Guide program, I spent two years in Pathfinders,³ where one girl was responsible for tea and snacks every meeting. No one ever remembered to bring milk (we were in a church basement) so I drank a lot of strong tea with stomach turning amounts of sugar in it.

As an adult, I drink lots of tea. One of the advantages to working in a university is that there are three separate Tim Hortons locations in my building, which makes it very easy to enjoy a cup. The disadvantage, of course, is that it makes it very easy to enjoy four cups in one day. (I do, occasionally, have eleven hour days up at the school.) I put a single cup coffee maker in my office last year and used it to heat water for me, which was also not helpful in the "restraining caffeine consumption to normal levels" department.

At home, we have an entire cupboard dedicated to tea. It's also got some hot chocolate and apple cider mix in it, but most of it is tea. I think we had 50 different kinds at last count. Some of it is Mat's, but most of it is mine. Strangely, for someone who owns this much tea, I do not own a nice teapot. I have a functional Pyrex one that looks more like a diner coffee pot, but it's much too large for my purposes, and it lacks character. I would really like to have a teapot with charm, and especially one that I could make sweet tea cozies for. ⁴

So, dear Reader, I must ask you: What kind of teapot do you have? Do you like it? What is the ideal teapot? What is the ideal tea cozy? Do you prefer one that fits on the pot, or one that covers it like a hat?

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¹ My mother occasionally likes to joke that the success of their early marriage was largely because they worked opposite shifts for a while, and thus never saw each other.
² Except when visiting my parents, because they have a Keurig and it's delightful. Also, cream is delicious.
³ Don't tell my mum, but I do actually regret not finishing the program, just like she said I would.
⁴ The current tea pot is roughly the same shape as a roll of toilet paper, so if I made a cozy for it, I'd adapt one of the sushi toilet roll cover patterns.