Bag photos

[jwgh]

As I mentioned earlier, I finished knitting this bag yesterday. It is currently really large, which is nice in a way (you can just throw whatever I want into it -- last night this included a large bottle of water, several balls of yarn, a sock I'm knitting, a music book, a Netflix DVD I wanted to put in the mail, two pie plates, and a pie server), but it is also pretty unwieldy, so I am hoping that it will shrink down a lot when I felt it, which I will probably start doing later today.

The pattern I used is Knitty's French Market Bag pattern, but I made some changes to it. Most obviously, I made the sides much longer (and I made the handles a little longer too). My last knitting bag was also based on this pattern, and the reason I decided to make a new one is that the handles on the old one started to fray a lot, so I decided that the handles on this new bag should be reinforced; I therefore used a combination of this pattern and this one for the handles. (Basically, the latter pattern incorporates a small icord on each side of the strap to make it more resistent to wear after it's felted.)

One of the points of this project was to get rid of a lot of wool yarn that I've had for a while, mostly odds and ends from old projects. From bottom to top I have:

- The grey yarn that makes up most of the bottom of the piece. I bought a bunch of this with no clear project in mind many years ago. Then at some point I had some project that required a felting yarn and I used most of it for that. (Unfortunately I forget what the project was.) After that, I had one skein left ...

- The mildly variegated purple above that is some Noro left over from a bag I made for my aunt Anne. (That bag also used the Knitty French market bag pattern.)

- Above that, there is a thin stripe of blue/green which is all that was left over from the yarn from my old knitting bag. The yarn and the pattern were given to me for my birthday some years ago by my sister, I think shortly after I started going to snbprov.

- Above that there's an even thinner stripe of yellow, green, and purple yarn. I got this yarn from theresat, who I believe spun it and possibly dyed it. I think I made a hat out of it.

- Then there's a burgandyish brown. I forget where that came from.

- Next, some fluffy variegated yarn that includes a dark purple and light blue. This is some cheap wool I got in Sturbridge, Massachusetts on a whim because I liked how it looked when it was felted. I got three skeins of it, for no particular reason. Apparently I used some of it for something, but I forget what.

- A little bit of olive green yarn, which I think I originally got to make a satchel for my mother.

- More of the Sturbridge yarn mentioned above.

- A whole lot of brown yarn I got from my sister's stash some years ago. I have previously used this yarn to make some stuffed animals.

- More Sturbridge variegated yarn.

- The next few stripes are light blue, dark purple, and a combination of medium blue and purplish brown. This yarn is all the same brand (Jamieson's Shetland DK) and was purchased to make a yoga mat bag from my stepmother for HMas a couple of years ago.

- The stripe of yellow uses two yarns which were purchased specifically for this project. Which goes against the spirit of the thing, but when I reached this point I really wanted to have a stripe of bright yellow. Originally I thought I was going to use one of the yellows or the other, but when I started knitting with them I was not completely satisfied with either, so I decided to do diagonal stripes of random lengths, and I am pretty happy with the outcome.

- The top stripe before the handles is some brown yarn given me by katrinkles's mother, because at this point my stash no longer had any yarn of an appropriate color.

- For the handles, I tried to decide whether I should continue with the brown or switch to some green yarn left over from the satchel I made for my mother (mentioned above). katrinkles convinced me that continuing with the brown was the way to go. In the event, though, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't going to have enough, so I hit upon the idea of making the handles be half brown and half green, which is what I ended up doing. I think this turned out pretty well, but we will see what happens when I felt the thing.

That about covers it. Whew!