Crochet Coffee Sleeve

The Girls Team is on fire in the crochet business! With so much leftover yarn from our Project Linus blankets we wanted to find a few smaller projects to work on to keep improving on our crochet skills (and not let the yarn go to waste). My mom made a cute coffee cup sleeve a few weeks back, and I came to her this week to learn from the master!

Because I have so much pink yarn left, I thought this would make the perfect Valentine's Day gift for some of my friends. I stitched the base of the sleeve while my mom made the adorable hearts. This was truly a team effort! 

To make the base we followed this pattern:
-Chain 13. (I increased to 16 for a wider base.)
-Single crochet in second chain from hook. Single crochet across. 
-Turn. 
-Chain 1. Single crochet across. 
-Repeat until body measures 8 inches long. 

The base of the sleeve at 8 inches...I'm still working on loosening up my stitches. You can see in the middle I got a little too tight so the edges aren't even - they dip in a little. As I improve at crocheting, I plan to work on relaxing my stitches (and relaxing in life!)...

Once the base was complete, I used a yarn needle to stitch up the sides. 

Here's the completed base of the sleeve. You can see that it slopes a bit on the top (because of my tight stitches). It didn't bother me enough to re-do it since this was my first try, but I plan on making about 5-6 more sleeves and will attempt to fix this issue as I create the others. 

While I was working on the base of one sleeve, my mom was able to crank out 4 crochet hearts. These are adorable! I forgot to grab the pattern to post on the blog but a simple Pinterest search for heart patterns will give you many options to choose from. Seriously, these are so cute!

I used the yarn needle to secure the heart to the sleeve. This is the sleeve inside-out so you can see how the heart was tied underneath. 

The finished sleeve. How cute is this you guys?! It took about two hours to complete (but that was splitting the tasks as a team). Still, this project is perfect for what we wanted to do...continue to improve on our crochet skills and make some cute gifts in the meantime! It's nice to make something that isn't as big of a time commitment after our past few long-term blanket projects. 

The yarn allows for a bit of a stretch to fit perfectly over coffee mugs and travel mugs. We can't wait to gift these to our friends wishing them a happy Valentine's Day (and safe, cool fingers on their hot coffee mugs!).