No fool like an ...

My Aussie Bag Lady Swap parcel arrived today.

Those of you keen on April Fool's pranks will appreciate that my bag is, wait for it

CROCHETED

Mel did a beautiful job - it reminds me a lot of the Snapping Turtle Skirt (Rav link, sorry) by Norah Gaughan, and we all know was a NG groupie I am!

The yarn is Noro Silk Garden in colours of red, pink and green - rich, rich colours

that pull you in.

There's also Maya Gold chocolate (considerably less than an hour ago when the photo was taken)here), vintage Patons patterns (such a good little stalker) and divinity of divinities, some of Mel and Pretty Girl's handspun. Glorious blues and purples and so soft and snuggly. Simply gorgeous.

I'm a very happy fool. :)

No wuckin furries

What's the foulest four-letter word starting with "F" that you can think of?

FELT.
Effin' FELT.

People, please, remind me that I am felt-challenged. Next time you read or hear my words - "bet that wool'd felt like a bugger" smack me - HARD.

My Bag Swap Pal is going to be a tad disappointed if she thinks she's getting a lovely knitted bag from me.

First I knitted an enormous garter stitch mitred square front. Looks a little large, but this yarn is so sticky, it'll felt like a bugger - no worries.

Then I knitted a matching mitred square back. 400g seems a lot of wool to have used by this point, but, you know - felting shrinks about 30% right? - no worries.

I ran out of garter stitch puff about then, but I only had the long garter stitch band that is the base sides and strap, - no worries.

Over the Canberra Day long weekend I forced myself to knit and knit and knit the garter stitch bloody band and spent 3 hours sewing the thing together. Still, it'd be worth it and I've still got a couple of weeks - no worries.

Then it was chucked in a hot wash with some similar coloured towels and a couple of pairs of jeans. First go around it looked ok, the fibres were matting and the black colour bleeding a little, but within the bounds of reason. Definitely needed another cycle, but I'd come to expect that - no worries.

3 cycles later, a good hard rubbing by hand and some hot/cold shock therapy, the bag had felted beautifully at the bottom of the sqare and along one side, not so much the strap and the other side. Also the top of the bag refused to shrink, leaving me with a fluted top instead of a sturdy square bag. I chucked it into the naughty corner for a while (because that had worked soooo well last time). Am starting to worry, but not much.

I am reminded that I have a clothes dryer, so another hot cycle for luck and into the dryer. Seriously - no change. If anything, the strap was both felting and stretching at the same time. The fibres were matting but it seemed to be getting longer. I stuffed it with a rolled up towel and left it to fully dry.

Easter Monday and mail out was due to start. The way to fix it, I decided, was to cut and sew the strap to a reasonable size and line the bag to try and straighten it up a little - no worries, just oblivious optimism.

Apparently making tomato chutney, supervising two thirteen year old budding knitters and sewing a lining from some rather lovely Indonesian fabric that had been a friend of a friend's dress, are not compatible activities. The lining refused to come together, largely because of the irregularities of the bag, but Jess has the beginnings of her first wash cloth and a few more kilos of tomatoes have been transformed into my second favourite condiment (chilli plum sauce is the most favourite).

In a vain attempt to turn a sow's ear into a felt purse and to stabilise the obvious problem stretch spots, I machine sewed a fancy stitch in a contrast colour around the edges. Not too bad, but still not the thing of beauty of my imagination.

So now it's Thursday night - tomorrow is the last day to post bags and I've begged The Shopping Sherpa to save the day. She generously provided one of her messenger bags in a colour enjoyed by my swap pal. The other little giftees are all packed and ready to go and I'm waiting for some hand-felted i-cord to dry, because the whole package is going to be wrapped in the sad excuse for a bag so that my Pal will at least know that I tried and I'm sorry.

Mad about Saffron

Tuesday is brought to you by the colour - YELLOW!


From the bottom - yellow teardrop tomatoes (and a rogue rouge one) the first to actually bloody ripen. They've been in for months! And they're in my favourite yellow enamel colander.

In the middle - bumper crop of yellow squash - they've been the marrow of (only) choice for the last month and will be going for at least another couple of weeks.

At the top - the swiss cheese bag. This has been finished for ages but I kept forgetting to post about it and then there was the fluff problem.


The pattern is Spring Green Bag (Ravelry link) by the lovely Lisa Ashton from Yarn issue 8. The yarn is Alafos Flos - a mohair wool blend.


The knitting bit was fun and the attached i-cord around the top of the bag and the i-cord handles not dire at all - the thought of metres and metres of i-cord when the bag was all knitted was worse than actually doing it. Lisa was very encouraging - particularly when it looked exactly like a string singlet for a Dalek. Apparently it was meant to look like that at that stage. Handy to know.


I do have issues with the felting process. Firstly, I had too much water in machine but only worked that out after a couple of cycles (I didn't keep filling the machine, I just put the wash cycle back a few times - all Canberrans can now stop dialling the dob-in-a-water-waster number and put down the 'phone). There was some felting but not as much or as evenly as I would prefer. Instead of just doing it all again later with less water, I kept adding stuff to be washed to enhance the agitation process. Great idea except that that one of the items I added was a chocolate brown bath towel. This time the felting worked pretty well, but was still a bit uneven and the brown fibres of the towel had felted to the bright yellow. At this point I removed the bag and put it a corner of the laundry to dry, think about it's behaviour and consider it's options.

Time passes *wubba, wubba, wubba*.

I'm about to do a white load in the machine. "Aha!" I think to myself - "Maybe if I put the bag with the brownish patches in with a white load the brownish patches will rub off ". Those of you with more experience of these things are, by now, way ahead of me and probably pointing at the screen and laughing. Yes. The browny bits were still there and have been joined by lots of white fluff (from the hand-towels added for agitation) and a couple of small white feathers. I guess one of my feather and down pillows is moulting and these came from a pillowcase. *Sigh*. The good news is, by this stage I'm happier with the eveness and degree of felting - either that or I've been so worn down by the process am willing to turn a blind eye. The bag goes back into it's corner to dry and consider it's behaviour again.

More time passes *wubba, wubba, wubba*.

So on Saturday I drag it out of the naughty corner and attack it with a disposable razor. Quite a bit of the fluff came off but by no means all. From a distance it's a sunny shade of yellow, up close it's a bit muddier and flaked with dandruff.

It's still a great pattern, I'd recommend it as a fun knit and swings off the bird feeder well.

This Sporting Al

In a culturvorian expedition yesterday to CraftACT yesterday*, The Shopping Sherpa and I couldn't help but continue the tradition of gussying up Al Grassby.

Al was in a sporting mood yesterday. Here he is gearing up for the shot-put while wearing some of bag swap WIP as a collar. It's recycled Peruvian wool, I think he'd approve of its multicultural flavour - he certainly liked Mardi Gras colours.

Practicing bowling. What do our resident cricket experts think of his action? I reckon he's a chucker and should be reported to the ACB. Although built more for spin, Al was all out for speed yesterday with this ball of reclaimed yarn.

*Exhibition of art prints and a clothing line by a Western Australian designer. Prints good, clothes - not so much. Good shapes and some nice tailoring which was let down by poor/lack of finish. If you're going to make a gorgeous tailored jacket, put some lining in it! Ditto, hand printed silk bolero good, trimmed with stretch ribbing bad. Also, not so much a fan of the exposed overlocked edge.

Was good to catch up with Barb, though, and we ran into the lovely Ninaribena of Canberra's Got Style - a fab new blog on the scene. Do yourself a favour and check it out.

In the bag

It's done - the first item on my list for the Yarn knit-along. See this post for yarn and pattern details. It's 4 repeats longer than the pattern and I put the eyelets in the second pattern repeat which gives a ruffled top.



Because this was a tape yarn I used it to make the ties as well.


I'm particularly pleased with the beads. The photo's not so hot, but I had wooden beads in exactly the right shades of orange and pink. No purchases were made to conceive or complete this project. Whacko!



And I've cast on my next KAL project, Ditte Larsen's Christiane Collar from issue 7, Winter 2007.

Yarn KAL

I don't join Knit-Alongs. They tend to be just too much pressure - knitting's meant to be fun and if I start putting deadlines to it, the fun dies and I stress badly. I don't mind setting myself goals, I just don't like the pressure of other people's expectations or the competitve drive that kicks in.

But when I saw that Kate was starting up a KAL to celebrate Yarn magazine and retiring editor Barbara Coddington, I decided I could cope. Read all about it here.

The idea is to knit a pattern from any or each of the 8 editions before issue 9 (hopefully March '08) is out.

I've got Buckley's of knitting 8 items by March '08, but I'm going to give it a go. Typically my first piece is not from any of the 8 paper editions, it's from the online sample issue. See, there's another reason I don't KAL - if I can't set the rules, I break them. That, and I'm a smart arse.

I'm setting some ground rules, though. I'll try and knit from each edition I haven't already knitted from and I'll use current boodle to complete each item. It would be really great if I could use some of the yarn I won from Yarn to knit a few. No telling how many items I'll make and my copies are already bristling with page markers. There's only one edition from which I'm struggling to find a pattern I really want to knit.

The first project, though - Barb's own Little Lace Bag. It's a sweet ripple pattern designed to make a pretty little evening bag. Thing is, though, I have about as much use for an evening bag as I do for set of iceskates. What I need is a little bag to protect the coffee mug I lug about to meetings etc. instead of using the plastic and sytrofoam usually on offer. So I’ve added a few pattern repeats and because I committed knitting sin number 2 (not reading the pattern the whole way through before casting on), I’ve put the eyelet row in the second pattern repeat.

I'm using Lang Moana, a Spidey leftover. It’s 50/50 cotton and acrylic. It’s making a dense fabric to protect my mug and washes well.I would have been finished but I cast on the second piece on the wrong size needle and was 1/3 the way through before I discovered the error.

So, anyone else up for the Yarn KAL? It''ll be fun. There's plenty of free online patterns or you can go over the the mag website and order back issues. Drop Kate a line kathrynthorne at hotmail dot com and she'll send you an invitation to the KAL blog.