Bag Adventures...

I have my knitting mojo back in felted bags at the moment. There have been lots of discoveries during this Research and Development phase. I am trying to find a 'goto' bag pattern. So far my experiments have ended up too big, too thin, and almost perfect.

Some tips for felting:

• Don't use towels, the lint will mute the colour of your bag, when I used jeans, the colours were much brighter and obviously no lint was on the bag when it came out of the machine.
  

• For a first attempt, stick to the pattern, I wanted a big bag - not a huge bag that is not good for anything. (see previous post)

• Maybe putting the item in a zippered pillow case is not a good idea, I never ran into any problems when I just threw it in the machine. (see below)
  

• Check the handles, when I used the pillow case the handles must have rolled in on themselves and felted that way therefore they ended up waaaay narrow.

• Check the bag, when I used the pillow case the bag felted in on itself where it was folded in half and put into said pillow case. Was difficult to pull apart and still has creases where it melded to itself.

To summarise: pictures later as blogger is not playing nice today, oh here we are...

First Bag: French Market Bag 256 sts around is waay too biig.
See last post for pics.

Second Bag: French Market Bag with 164 sts is still a little on the big side but not too bad, handles are a bit too short.






Third bag: Ann's Petite Felted Bag, this is the one where I mucked it up by putting it in the pillow case for felting, apart from that it is a good size and I am making a second one that will be perfect :)





See the difference in handle with? I assure you they are both 9 sts wide.


Fourth Bag: Petite Felted Carrier, decreasing the handles at a rate of 9 rows to make up for the mod to change to two handles. No pics - but a WIP none the less.

All of these are knitted with Vintage Hues and 5.5mm needles.

Cat Content:



They line up for food in our house. Always in this order though.