Slow and Steady
May 6th, 2006 | View Comments
Quinn is done. I’ve sewn the lining in
and taken her out for a spin.
I’m a poet! (But I know it.)
The bag comes out to be 9″x9″ with about a 3.5′ strap. There are a couple of details that I’m not entirely happy with. The seaming between the two parts of the bag is messy. Next time I think I’m going to pick up stitches from the top band and knit down towards the bottom instead of trying to seam it.
And my knitting looks uneven since I ripped the bag out so many times in the course of designing it and simply re-knit with the kinky yarn. An initial blocking helped a lot, but I think another round through the wash might be warranted.
The notebook you see peeking out of the bag is the reason I made the bag to begin with. My friend Elenita gave me this fantastic Alice in Wonderland notebook last year and I carry it around all the time, filling it with cryptic notes and doodles in an utterly disorganized fashion.
It’s the perfect size for a little notebook but too big for all my usual purses and I don’t like to have to carry around a backpack for something relatively small. So I put my knitting mind to it and came up with this cute (if I do say so myself) cabled bag that is the perfect size for the notebook and a few other purse-y doodads.
I have yarn for a second bag, so I’m going to write up the pattern, test-knit the pattern on bag #2, and then post it…sometime.
The turtle is also chugging along nicely. I’ve finished re-knitting all the limbs, the head, and the tail in the round. I’m much happier with not having to fold all those little buggers in half and sew them together. I’ve also finished the belly.
It’s finally hitting home to me that when the pattern says the finished turtle is 10″, that means the finished turtle is…10″. This entire time I’ve been imagining that I’ve been knitting a much larger creature. Weird.
Anyways, after much swatching and ripping out, I’ve decided to pretty much abandon the pattern for the shell. It called for knitting nine pieces…NINE…and then sewing them together. Um, no. Plus I didn’t quite like the texture pattern the designer used and decided I’d rather stick to colorwork.
I played around a bit with short rows and intarsia, but decided I would much rather knit the shell in the round given that it’s…a round object. So I charted out what I hope will be a cute little shell pattern with some simple geometric shapes and started knitting.
This is my first attempt at stranding, so wish me luck!
CogKnition posted this on May 6th, 2006 @ 4:16pm in Bags, Finished Objects, Unfinished Objects | Permalink to "Slow and Steady"
cogknition
Hi Sharon,
I sent you an email last night, but yes! I am going to write up the pattern. I don’t really know when, but I’ll probably have time to get to it within the next month or so.
Quinn is awesome, I love the cables and the colour is so bright, love it.
Are you going to write the pattern up as I for one would love it