Sometimes you get a gift that is exactly what you needed, but you had no idea that you did. This year I got one such gift, and what was immediately apparent was that in order to use it without risking breakage, I would need to make a crochet counter cozy to protect it.

The gift was this “no drip” cruet for olive oil:

It is elegant, it is lovely, it worked as advertised, and I was 100% sure that I would break it if I had to set it down on a granite counter top every day from now until the end of my life.

So before I had the opportunity to transform this lovely gift into an oil spill with glass shards and tears, I went to one of my many bins of yarn, found something suitable, and got to work transforming the yarn into a sort of “cruet coaster” that would protect my new cruet.

I decided to use a worsted weight yarn and a 5.0 mm hook, and with just a few mistakes here and there that required a small bit of frogging and re-crocheting, I had a crochet counter cozy…almost:

Once I finished the sixth round it was just about exactly the right size. All I had left to do was figure out the final, finishing round, and after trying two different approaches, I settled on a simple slip stitch all the way around:

With the cozy all done and the ends woven in, the only thing I had left to do was to transform my notes into a useable crochet pattern. It took a notation here and a correction there, but soon, the crochet counter cozy pattern was done.

There is something incredibly powerful about being able to create that thing you need, even if it is just a 216 stitch crochet cozy, and that is why I continue my crochet journey, one stitch at a time.