I knit my first felting project a couple of weeks ago. One day, in the magical world of the interweb I found a website called Elann.com. They had their own brand of yarn that they sold (a lot of it very cheap!), and a ton of free, albeit a bit odd, patterns. Immediately I ran to my friend Kelsey and showed her the wonderful goodness that was Elann yarn. Some time later I still hadn’t managed to come by the means of shopping online, nor had I come up with a viable project to use their yarn for, so I tucked the site away in my bookmarks folder and forgot about them.
Some time later Kelsey comes over and lo and behold, she’s made herself a felted bag! And where did she get the yarn and the pattern? Elann. She bought some of their Peruvian Highland Wool and used one of their free bag patterns on the site. Kelsey is an awesome knitter, and one of the things I admire about her is her capability to just dive right in and start a project, modifying it to fit her needs as she goes along. I, despite my best efforts, cannot do that. I have to plan out everything in advance, and if I’m not sure something is going to go well, I put off the whole project and it likely won’t get done.
But boy was her felted bag beautiful. A dark forest green background with alternating blue and purple mosaic patterns circling the body. She used Manos del Uruguay in some moss and forest greens for the strap of the bag and some of the flap. I was envious, and just had to make one.
Of course, that was last fall, and it’s only now that I’m getting around to making my own bag. I’ve had the yarn for a few months which I bought from their website along with some yarn for a lace skirt and ended up starting the skirt first. That remains a UFO (UnFinished Object), but for some reason at the time an ankle-length lace skirt seemed less daunting than a felted bag. I think it was the idea of having to do all that swatching. Oof.
When I finally started knitting the bag, I ventured online to find out about how to do this mosaic pattern. It turns out that the technique I’d be employing was “stranding,” rather than “fair isle” or “intarsia.” With stranding you carry your unused color behind your work as many as 5 (sometimes 7) stitches, and with fair isle it seems that the “hardcore” fans will say that you never carry your yarn more than one or two stitches along. Traditional fair isle patterns also have a constantly changing background color. Now, as far as I understand it (feel free to enlighten me if you know!) intarsia is still colorwork, but involves large blocks of color. I’ve often seen intarsia patterns with big diamonds.
Once I started knitting the bag and figured out how to hold twice as many strands of yarn in my right hand, things went quite smoothly. The Peruvian Highland Wool was great to work with, and it only took me a few days to finish the body of the bag.
Ways In Which I Messed Up:
1.) I knew I’d taken a picture of Kelsey’s bag, but I’d neglected to look at it again before starting the bag, so like her, I ended up running out of the background color “Bisque” before I got to the last 5 rows or so at the top of the bag.
2.) I didn’t do a gauge swatch. Disliking gauge swatches as much as I do, and knowing that I might not have enough yarn to do so, I subsequently found that the Lumpy Bumpy Yarn by Charlene in Fall Colors that Farmhouse Yarns makes doesn’t felt at the same rate as the Peruvian. I didn’t figure that this would be an issue, because I didn’t mind having a wider bag strap or a bigger flap. Turns out that with this yarn and the way it felted, the flap of the bag bows out toward the edge, giving it a slightly triangular shape.
3.) I didn’t do a gauge swatch. Yes, I’ve said this one already, but it’s important. Because I didn’t know the felting rate of the Lumpy yarn, I didn’t know how long to knit the bag’s strap, due to the fact that I had no idea how much it would shrink.
4.) I didn’t do a gauge swatch. I know, I know, but because I didn’t, it turned out that the Lumpy yarn felted at a vastly different rate than the Peruvian.
In the end, I had to sit in the tub for an hour in hot water hand-felting the Lumpy yarn part of the bag so as to not felt the body of the bag any more than it already was. That stuff likes to felt. A lot. That, and it felted so much that I ended up stretching it post-felting process with my life-saving (in so many ways) Joy of Cooking behemoth.
The bag looks great, and I immediately set out to make a second one. This time I used stash yarn back from when I still lived on Whidbey Island with the folks, Lumpy Bumpy Yarn by Charlene in Kaleidoscope. It has royal purple, aqua green, turquoise blue all mixed in, and every skein is different. Some skeins were lighter, so between colors they’d fade into lavender, moss green, and sky blue. It’s so gorgeous.
That bag happens to be drying now, and (again) because I didn’t swatch, it’s more of a messenger bag style, being a bit wider than long… completely the opposite of the first bag. That, and the flap is a bit short I think. But all and all, it’s realy pretty and I think the recepient will love it (yes, this is a gift).
That’s it for my felting experience. I’ve been taking color orders for subsequent bags for all of my friends, because the Peruvian yarn for a whole bag will only cost about $20. Woo!
Next episode: lace? AHH!
