Felting Fun

I fell in love with the bag pattern in "Last Minute Knitted Gifts." Because I prefer bigger needles and thicker yarn, I decided to make the bag bigger but use felting wool so that I could felt it, and therefore, shrink it.

The pattern was fairly simple. You start at the top a bit wider than the rest of the body of the bag. You decrease and add yarn overs to get the eyelet row.

The bag also required the "three needle bind off" which was easier than the kitchner stitch. The seam is a little more obvious but very neat.

I've been wanting to try felting for a few months. So after the bag was done, I put it in the wash here at my apartment complex. The points I remembered learning in my class was that the water should be hot, there should be a little bit of detergent and things with it in the wash to add friction. Two washes later on "hot" and while the fibers were fuzzy, they weren't FELTED. This past weekend, I took a load of laundry to my mom's house and used her machine to give it one more try.

Presto! I had felt! The bag indeed shrunk, so much so that the row of holes barely showed. The holes are supposed to be for a drawstring but felt is not an ideal material for a drawstring bag. So I threaded a ribbon through the holes just for decoration and added Icord handles. Viola!

It might not seem like much of an accomplishment but it really made me feel like I'd conquered something in the crafting world...expanding my abilities and stretching my patience a little has gone a long way in making me more confident as a knitter and a crafter, in general.

What project do you have going that is challenging you?