So I just started making my own yogurt. I followed Madhur Jaffrey's recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking, one of my favorite cookbooks. See here for a really great, detailed tutorial about making your own yogurt. The tutorial is very in-depth though,  I am kinda glad I didn't read that before I tried to make yogurt for the first time, because I would have been intimidated. Really, it's not difficult at all.

Madhur just has you heat a quart of milk to boiling, cool it to about 110 degrees, add it to 2 tablespoons of yogurt and let everything sit, carefully bundled, for 8 hours. I have a plethora of felted wool sweaters and they seemed the perfect material to insulate the culturing milk. I designed this cozy to fit around a wide-mouth quart jar and it's worked very well. I think it looks like a cozy shawl-collared jacket for my yogurt.

Want to make one too? Great. Here is what you will need:

Supplies

• One thick felted wool sweater, at least 17" wide at the bottom
• Leather cord or leather remnant, or ribbon
• 3 buttons
• Thread that matches the buttons and the leather cord
• Wide mouth quart Mason jar

Materials

• Scissors
• Ruler
• Needle

1. Cut your sweater: my piece is 17" wide and 15.5" tall. It's a big tube- I left it like that and didn't finish the raw edge. This sweater was really good and felted. If yours looks like it might ravel, you could blanket stitch around the raw edge.

2. I wanted to use leather for the button loops, so I cut about 1/8" wide section in a spiral around a leather remnant to make a long piece of leather. You could use rawhide lacing or a piece of ribbon.

3. Then cut 3 pieces about 8" long and loop them together and knot. 

4. Pick out three buttons. Please don't get distracted looking through vintage buttons and waste 20 minutes like I did.

5. Using thread that matches the buttons, sew the buttons on your sweater piece- on the front the buttons go on the left bottom corner- they are about 1" in from the edge and 1" and 3" up from the bottom. On the flip side, add a button about .5" in from the edge and 7.5" up from the bottom.

6. Using thread that matches the loops, add the loops to the front- 3" in from the right side edge and 1" and 3" up from the bottom. On the back, 1.5" from the edge and 7.5" up from the bottom. 

7. Snug the jacket over the mason jar, fold down the collar and make some yogurt. Yum.