Personalized Mug Cozy

I’m a sucker for a good Venn Diagram, especially when they are humorous or snarky. And sometimes they occur in my craft world, as in this project, where my love for lettering, felt and easy embroidery completely and totally overlap to create a personalized mug cozy.

I’ve seen lots of versions of these mug cozies in varying degrees of complicated – some were crocheted/knitted, some were sewn and embroidered. While my mind was wandering last week (I think of some of my best work and craft ideas while either unloading the dishwasher or riding the stationary bike) it occurred to me that I could make a personalized mug cozy by back stitching my lettering.

This is a scrap busting project, and sure enough I had a scrap of gray felt left from making a phone holder. I know most of the mug cozies are curved in shape, and I was originally going to figure out the math to make one fit when I realized that my to-go coffee tumbler is really very straight sided and wouldn’t need anything more complicated than a rectangle.

I cut the felt to the correct length with some overlap so that I could use Velcro to close it. I’d love to make a button and buttonhole closure for this, but honestly, I still haven’t sat down to read how to use that feature on my sewing machine. One day I will, but today was not that day.

Instead, I draped my felt over the cup and used pins to give me an approximate width of the space I wanted to letter. If I stretched the wording across the entire length it would be difficult to read.

I used a thin black sharpie to letter my name in a monoline style. Anything fancier would push my embroidery skills way past their limit. If you are wondering why I didn’t use one of those air soluable fabric markers for this, the answer is I tried that on a different project and I couldn’t work fast enough to beat the clock on the evaporating markings. The thin sharpie line would be covered by my embroidery floss, but if you wanted to do this on lighter material with lighter or thinner floss, you’d need to find a different solution.

I used the basic back stitch for my embroidery, partly because it’s really well suited for letters, and mostly because I don’t know too many other stitches yet. I have found this great resource for stitching, and I plan on doing more fun little projects to learn more stitches in the future.

Once the lettering was done, I applied my Velcro – remember one piece goes on the inside and the other on the outside so they wrap up correctly. My Velcro is self adhesive, but I added a few stitches to keep it gripped to the felt.

My travel tumbler has a neat feature where the bottom screws off and you can insert any sort of paper to decorate it. It came with a template that I miraculously haven’t lost, so I cut a sheet of printable buffalo plaid (available in my Etsy shop) and that was a perfect finish for this project.

Pin this in case your desire to have your love of felt, embroidery and lettering comes together and you want to make your own personalized mug cozy.

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