I think it’s a bag jag

A double stranded bag in Ella Rae Classic yarn, four colors, using the booga bag pattern, but on 9mm needles and inserting holes for a strap to be added later. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. It only took me two days to do. Apparently my daily stitch count is higher than 3,000 after all.

But this is definitely not the last bag I’m going to be making. Because I already cast on for the next one:

Other people buy accessories to match their stuff. This Rebecca knits them. And for some reason, a matched set of bags to traipse through an imaginary airport seemed just the thing. Especially if worn with my beloved wool coat.

I think that if there’s enough yarn left after this bag, maybe one more, for a water bottle. And/or a hat. Maybe a vest. I don’t know. We’ll see. Twelve balls go far, after all.

bag’s end

I finally felted the bag from last week. The yarn felted up amazingly well, and the bag became a small square thing. SHRINK!

You can tell where I i-corded the top edge of this bag, because the colors are more solid there, but texture wise, there’s no difference. Very cool.

Square. And strapped. I’m not sure I’m crazy about the strap I put on this bag, but it’s originally a leather belt. I have an imagination! I wish I could have used my blue silk belt instead, but it’s a lot of blue, and there’s not much blue in this bag at all. Any other ideas? An i-cord strap is WAY OUT. So out it’s not in. At all.

I love all the different mottling here. It’s just fun! It didn’t stripe, it didn’t pool, and it managed to felt well despite the fact it was obviously a white base yarn. It only took two trips through the machine.

Another look at it because I can’t resist. That top edge is spiffy isn’t it?

I need to find someone who loves this bag. Is it you?

calling card

Picasso kind of got busted for getting onto the freshly painted dining table. I wonder how.

needles

Here’s my small stash of straight needles and double pointed needles. Come on, show me yours!

bag on my mind

A smaller Heidi inspired bag this time, made of the yarn from the dyeorama swap last year. Hmmm, for some crazy reason, I’d thought I was going to crochet a scarf?!? Hm. I’d forgotten all about that. Too late now! Hee. When I was doing up the hank into a ball, I realized the yarn stuck together. Yeah, that’s sometimes a bad thing. But inspiration struck, I blinked, and the next thing I knew, I had a bag on my hands.

I’m quite curious how this will felt together colorwise. I love the little blips of blue here and there, but who knows how it’ll all turn out.

Should be a pretty little bag!

one more

I’d always wanted to try Moda Dea Ticker Tape, don’t ask me why. When a store near the apartment was getting rid of ALL its yarn stock, the only yarn I bought was this. $2. Pink. Surely you could have seen this coming.

What to do with it though. It’s not as though I lack pink scarves. There’s these, that, and this. Did I need a fifth pink scarf? The answer, clearly, was YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But a neckscarf this time. Not a long one, but one just long enough to tie jauntily to one side and drape over my collar, not too hot for upcoming job interviews, but also not too lame-o. Plain garter stitch, clearly, was OUT.

Then I thought about Crazy Aunt Purl’s drop stitch scarf tutorial. YES! I’d never done this before, and hey, a small scarf, what the hey. I decided to do three garter ridges, a two wrap drop stitch, three more garter ridges, a one wrap drop stitch. Rinse, repeat.

It’s just a silly little scarf, but sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed.

hands hands hands

Is there anything more macaroni and cheese-y than Manos del Uruguay? I ask you. It’s pure tactile comfort, single ply and yet always exciting, and utterly unsplitty. Thick thin thick thick thin thin thick thin. And then there’s the colors. And the quick progress on 9mm needles.

And then the wrist pain, kind of like a hangover, when you realize that the day’s particular knitbender comprised 4800 stitches, when your average is 3000.

Hurts so good.

The recipe I’m loosely basing this handy adventure on is Black Sheep Bags’s Heidi pattern, easily my favorite bag of all time. This is my fourth version. Four! Perhaps the bag equivalent of my bucket hats. It’s such a macaroni and cheese-y pattern. Easy easy mindless stockinette round and round and round until your wrist falls off. I love the wraparound straps, sooooo sturdy!

The odd thing about these multicolored skeins of Manos is that I’m making a bag out of them. Which was exactly my original intention. It may be a crying shame to felt Mmmmmmanos, but you know, it creates such a wonderfully thick felt and I still love my first felted bag, a Manos booga bag. And hey. Sometimes you just suddenly feel the stars aligning and you think, now. Now’s the time. Time for hands and time for Manos and time for that bag to finally become a reality.

It’s an expensive bag, as felted bags go, but I have faith it’ll be awesome. And boy am I loving the knitting.

My thumb sure shows it doesn’t it?

sleepless with picasso

Poor Picasso has had a hard week this week. Which meant, by extension, that Rebecca had a bit of a sleepless week too.

He’s not ordinarily a needy cat, unless he’s busy being a depressed Saran Wrap, and he hasn’t been depressed like that since November or so. This week’s problems were midwestern thunderstorms, which are much louder than they are on the east coast, and he spends hours wedged into my elbow, whimpering and mewping and shaking all over and trying to bury himself into my arm. It’s all I can do to hug and rock him for as long as it takes until he settles down and we fall asleep together.

He does the same for me when I need it.

one walking sock down

Tell me, how do you like the look of how this yarn knitted up?

It’s okay, really, I can take your harsh criticism.

As for me, I rather like it. I call it graffiti dyeing.

Whoops, my secret is out.

picot hem goodness: a tutorial

A how to in many many pictures. One thing I realized though, was that, you know, I’m a left handed knitter. This may or may not mean that the picture tutorial will be too hard to follow. I don’t know, so I’m gonna just put up the pictures as they are, and then we will figure out what I need to do from here. I was going to just go ahead and flip them around, but that proved too confusing for me.

I hope this does help, though…. It’s low pressure but looks fab. WE LOVE THAT.

Find your needles, however many you use or what kind you use for a pair of socks. Got that? Now you find some waste yarn, preferably in a solid color, just because it’s harder to do it if it’s variegated. I know this from experience…. Put a single slipknot onto a needle.

Got that?

Now cast on as many stitches as you need with the backwards loop method. Yes, just a simple backwards loop. It really doesn’t matter how many, as long as it’s an even number. Need an odd? Add one more, you really do need an even number. For reference, my usual sock count is 60. Yours will be whatever you need yours to be. Makes sense?

Divide them onto needles or not, it doesn’t matter really. Don’t worry about your tension, don’t worry about excess yarn. It’s waste yarn, right?

When you’re all done backwards looping except for the last one, cut waste yarn, and make a slipknot for the last one. There! You are all cast on. DO NOT JOIN.

Now start knitting, with the yarn you’re using for the sock. Don’t worry about tension, don’t worry about the looseness. It’ll all tighten up later, pinky swear. Don’t do a fancy join when you’re finally all done knitting all the waste stitches, just set them up so you’re sure they’re not twisted, and then knit as usual. Really. Don’t do anything special. It’ll be loose, that’s normal. REALLY.

Knit nine more rows. You want ten rows total, NOT COUNTING THE WASTE YARN ROW and counting the row that’s on the needles. Do one row of YO K2tog. This is the turning row. Do me a favor and count each needle as you go to make sure your count is right. Not that I ever have been guilty of screwing up that poor row repeatedly. Now do ten more rows, NOT COUNTING THE TURNING ROW but including the row on the needles.

I don’t worry about doing the inside portion on smaller needles, or doing a different row count or blah blah blah blah. Too much hassle. This is low stress, right? It looks good, right? Moving along.

This is what you should have at this point. Not too shabby.

Now the fun part begins.

This is how I do it, because I find it a lot easier and neater this way, and still is low stress.

Take a deep breath, and find five more needles. Smaller ones, if possible. Just makes it easier. They don’t have to be the same size or color. You’re just going to pick up the stitches off the waste yarn.

This is why I like the backwards loop - one stitch is held by two loops of the backwards loop, and no, it doesn’t “unzip”, but it is safer this way because you can’t have loose stitches without meaning to. Which is good. Now get the loop that’s attached to the very last slipknot… Now see, I’m left handed, so I started with the loop on the right side of the gap. You’re right handed, probably, so you probably would start with the loop on the left side? Same principle though. You may find that the tail is through one loop, just pull it out until it is loose and is a perfect stitch. Don’t worry if it gets muffed. LOW STRESS. We will fix that later.

Just keep picking up each stitch and pull out the waste yarn with a smooth fwoop fwoop of a knitting needle as you go.

You’ll find that if you keep the stitch count the same on your picked up needle as you do on the knitted-on needle, they’ll match up fine. The “gap” in the waste yarn lines up with the needle placements, which is neat! It’s almost as if I planned that.

Just keep picking up the stitches and keep going and going and you’ll find that miraculously the stitch count is the same as the stitch count on your knitted-on needles. How about that? If they aren’t, and are one stitch short, just use the tail to pull through another stitch. One stitch too many? We’ll fudge.

Now fold the wrong sides together and kind of origami the whole thing into a tube, trying to keep like needles together.

Now this next part is maybe the trickiest of the whole thing, or maybe the most tedious. The directional information of the loops I give are accurate for left handed knitting. Please, someone let me know what the loops should look like for right handed knitting so I can toss it in for everyone else. I’m clueless!

Right about this point is when a Matisse or perhaps a catchen of a more local flavor will become interested in the hemming process.

What we are doing here is putting the loops on both needles together onto one needle. You don’t HAVE to do this, but it makes for a much neater result IMO, and this way you know everything is oriented properly and the joining row is easier.

The row AWAY from me I insert the needle like this:

And the row CLOSE to me I do it like this:

This is how you orient the stitches so that they do not become twisted when you join. Left handedly and backwards, anyway.

And this is how I join… Just a lovely row of K2tog all the way around the round. One plain row even. And you’re all done! Hemmed!

And now I’m so busted on the fact that I actually knit socks inside out and left handed.

The Matisse is tired now.