Tapioca and beer cozies

I met with my brother for some shopping and we got to try bubble tea.  Apparently Bubble Tea Cafe is a new store in the mall set up after the cookie place went out of business.  There were lots of different flavors to choose from, including honeydew, taro and blueberry, but we settled on grape and mango-peach flavor, respectively. 

We both thought it was delicious and I personally liked the tapioca peals: they taste sweet and chewy and you suck them up through a huge half-inch wide straw.  These drinks are expensive at $4.25 (only one size available), but it’s a nice treat and those tapioca pearls are really filling!

I crocheted the Beer Bracelets while waiting/riding the San Juan ferry in the morning, about a two hour stretch.   They’re a little too small for the bubble tea containers, but I imagine they would fit just fine on a beer bottle or paper coffee cup. 

I was thinking I’d get an action photograph somewhere along in the day with some coffee cups, but the bubble tea models were an unexpected surprise.  Add the flower pot from the entrance of the mall and some odd stares from fellow shoppers and poof, crochet FO pictures! 

I went a little crazy sewing on the buttons.  I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to sew just two parallel lines.  It just speaks to my sewing skills I guess.  Speaking of yarn, I used TLC Essentials in Jungle and a random ball of yarn rescued from the local thrift store.  If anyone could identify this purple and pink variegated yarn I would be very happy!

The Beer Bracelets use the linked treble stitch, which creates tall, connected stitches.  If you’ve seen my adjacent double crochet stitch tutorial, you know I’m a fan of patching up unwanted crochet holes.  The picture above shoes the horizontal bars which you loop around, like in tunisian crochet.   Every linked TR row is followed by a row of single crochet and the whole cozy is bordered in slip stitches. 

Here you can see the wrong size of the cozy with the linked TR stitches separated by single crochet stitches. 

And for good measure, this is what the car deck of the ferry looked like just before docking back on Orcas Island.  You can see a slide show of all the ferry pictures I took that day on Slide.com.