Washing My Blues Away

I think the gnomes stole some color from my felting project. I knitted a bag, it had lovely shades of blues and pinks- Exhibit A

Then I machine felted it and all the color faded into Exhibit B, the Gnome-napped version.

Gnomes, I’m telling you.

Then again, it was a ball of wool yarn from my stash that I am foggy on the origins of. All I know is it was 100% wool, I started a pair of socks with it, didn’t like them, frogged the yarn to oblivion, then decided to felt the thing into a bag. I'm really glad they didn't continue on to be faded out socks.

What? Did I test a swatch to see what would happen? Uh… no. Why would I do that? To know what would happen in the wash, you say? Hmm, you may have a point there. Ah well, I wasn’t happy with the yarn anyhow.

Then there was this bag, Exhibit C,

Knit with Caron Felt-It in Adobe color.

It behaved exactly like it was supposed to. Of course it felted a bit smaller than it should have, probably because someone got caught up reading a book leaning on the washing machine and let the bag agitate a might too long… It still works as a large clutch. The bag is about 14 inches by 8 inches. I made some i-cord out of sock yarn for a handle, it doesn’t match, but stuff like that never bothers me. I knit fraternal socks, sometimes distant cousin socks, and still wear them.

I went through my polymer clay buttons and lined up some possibilites. Of course, I may have to make one just for the bag, because in the 200+ buttons I have, I can't find one I really like. (Yes, I make buttons for handknits. Because I don't have enough hobbies) Flimsy excuse to play with polymer clay, but I'll take it. Ignore the lopsidedness, they really are round - unless they were square- I was lazy and put the buttons on the scanner instead of making a paper tent and photographing them properly, so I tried to clean them up in Photoshop and just chewed along the edges. But you get the idea. At least I wasn't standing on a bucket like I did to photograph the bags. The trials of being short...

These are the prime button candidates until I make more.

So what was the Bag pattern? Uh, the Wing-It pattern. You know, knit until it looks right, jury-rig the sides and sew the whole thing together. I measure if held at gun point; otherwise I just eyeball the whole thing. I guess that makes me a process knitter, (or an ADD process knitter). I can make something following pattern directions once, after that, well, wouldn’t this part look better longer? And what if I change this piece and swap these out…

I cook like that too. As several of my favorite philosophers have observed, “Sometimes it’s better to travel than to arrive.”