Felted! Bag!

I felted my crazy leftover colorwork bag, and I LOVE it!Finished dimensions: the round base is about 9” in diameter, and the bag is about 14” from base to top edge.  I forgot to measure it before felting so I’m not sure how much is shrunk (but it was a lot).

I’m totally psyched that I didn’t buy a single new ball of yarn for this project.

The bottom is knit from the outside in to the center.  I chose to use two colors and knit so that a spiral is formed.  You can see it more clearly in the pre-felting photo:I really like the way the bottom looked on the inside pre-felting, too: If I make another one, I might make those spiral rounds two stitches wide instead of just one, to make the finished effect more bold.  The sharp spiral blurs out a lot after felting:In fact, the stitch patterns that look best in the finished bag are the bolder ones (like the purple and gold one, and the wine and green one).  I’ll remember that next time. 

All in all, I’m very pleased.

Yesterday I “had” to go to The Mannings with a friend who is reacquainting herself with knitting.  Her grandmother taught her when she was a child, and she just had the urge to pick up the needles again.  She’s been practicing on a scarf-like piece and wanted to get yarn to knit a hat.  So, off we went.

This gave me the opportunity to acquire some yarn to make S1 a new pair of felted clogs.  The old ones are three years old and are wearing through.  Here are the colors I chose: The upper will be green, and the trim and sole will be purple.  And… I’m thinking of doing some whimsical embroidery on the green part, too.  Robots, perhaps?  We’ll see!

Progress report

I haven’t posted lately, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been knitting.  Home life is a little hectic due to kitchen renovations and the impending holiday, but knitting always goes on.

I finished a super basic, plain vanilla pair of socks for Boy 1.  These were done mostly at work out of a Regia self-patterning yarn that has been in my stash FOREVER.  He loves them!  He’s been wearing them to bed every night since they were completed, and today he wore them all day.  Mama can’t argue with that. When I last bemoaned the state of my Tangled Garden socks (the pink and green ones for Pam), I mused about possible skill-building projects to do before returning to those socks.  I started one: a stranded colorwork felted bag made from leftover scrap/stash yarn.  I was inspired by this bag: This is an OLD issue of Spin-Off from before I was a subscriber – it came my way from someone whose husband brought it home from an auction (with some other stuff, I think).  This bag is cast on at the bottom (168 stitches) and worked up in the round as a straight tube until the handles are shaped.  Then stitches are picked up again at the cast-on edge and worked inward to create the bottom.  I decided that 168 was a great number, being divisible by 12, 8, 6, and 4, so I cast on 168.  I gathered all my feltable stash yarn in one place… …grabbed my copy of Color by Kristin (which has a colorwork dictionary in the back with patterns organized by number of stitches/repeat), and went for it: My two-handed knitting IS improving, and these color patterns are kind of fun.  I like how quickly they move on a 10.5 needle (of course, I’m knitting loosely because this will be felted).  I like using stash yarn.  I like how unplanned this is.  It works for me right now.

I also decided to knit those adorable Pile-able Pups that I saw at Cloverhill Yarn Shop a few weeks ago.  These will be a Christmas gift for my niece Allie, who is three-and-a-half.  I ordered some WotA (Wool of the Andes) from Knit Picks and have started the first pup.  It hasn’t escaped me that I will be able to use any puppy leftovers in the stashy bag!

I have another pair of plain vanilla socks on the needles for office knitting, but I don’t even have a photo of them right now.  Another day.