Pattern: Booga Bag
Yarn: Brown Sheep Company Lamb’s Pride Worsted. MC: Rasberry, Contrast: Victorian Pink
Needles: 6.5mm/60cm Crystal Palace bamboo circular, 6.5mm Tulip bamboo DPNs

After much assistance from Robyn and a hairdryer my second Booga Bag is done. I really like this pattern, so quick and easy and such a lovely result. I was planning to finally make one for myself out of the remaining Lambs Pride, but now I am thinking I will wait until I can get my hands on some Kureyon and use my Lambs Pride to make a Market Bag for my knitting.

Here’s one more photo for good measure.

Pattern: Booga Bag
Yarn: Brown Sheep Company Lamb’s Pride Worsted. MC: Khaki, Contrast: Rasberry
Needles: 6.5mm/60cm Crystal Palace bamboo circular, 6.5mm Tulip bamboo DPNs

The upside of a heat wave is speedy drying of the felted object! I put this one through the washer yesterday morning and it was nearly dry by late afternoon - just in time for Jesse to point out that I had blocked it with the fabric twisted to one side. So I wet it again and it dried for a second time by late this afternoon.

It’s cooler today, but the fear of tomorrow’s weather had us off to the shops to buy a wading pool. As it happens we already had a wading pool but it was so enormous that after 20 mins pumping with the foot pump the first ridge was less than half full. I spent that 20 mins considering whether it was morally acceptable to waste enough water to fill such a large area even 4 inches deep and what a hassel such a big pool would be in our tiny yard. So off to the shops we went to get a pool that could be fully inflated in 10-15 mins and use FAR less water to cool and entertain my little fish.

Isabelle had a ball and I got to assemble the Booga Bag during daylight hours - daylight knitting is a novelty round here. Making holes big enough to get the strap through was nigh on impossible and involved forcing two 7mm DPNs through each hole at the same time (not easy) and then attaching the strap to a stitch holder and using that to pull it through the holes. I think I will actually knit some holes into the fabric next time…

I hope the intended recipient likes it, if they don’t Isabelle is hoping they will give it to her.

Look at that - a Booga bag ready to felt! I started this on Tuesday night, knit the base and about 7 rows of the body of the bag. Wednesday I spent working on the Phildar Hoodie. I finished the body of the bag Thursday and Friday nights apart from the icord bind off which I added this afternoon. Tonight I spent a very long time knitting a very long icord, six feet to be exact (btw it is exactly the same colour as the bag, just bad light in the photo).

Quick and easy - apart from a small problem with that icord bind off. On the left is my first attempt at joining the two ends of the icord, I was trying to convince myself that it would be ok when I took this photo. What is it about a photo that makes you see that it won’t be alright at all? I took it back to the couch, prepared to rip the whole thing off if I had to, unpicked the join and somehow it just came together the second time round, nice and neat, certainly neat enough for felting.

Look what came in the post today! One skein of Cascade 220 in colour #9407 and two skeins of Lambs Pride Worsted in Khaki. Yum!

The Cascade is destined to become a Sophie bag. I feel a bit unoriginal using the exact colour shown in the pattern but I am having a thing for green at the moment and choosing yarn from tiny swatches online gives me hives.

The Khaki Lambs Pride is what the nice folks at Threadbare chose for me as a contrast to the Raspberry I am using to make my Booga Bag. I had already changed my mind and decided I really wanted pink to go with the Raspberry Booga Bag (and ordered accordingly) before today’s parcel arrived so I am not sure what exactly I am going to do with this Khaki. What I am sure of is that I LOVE it, there is something so inviting and soothing about this yarn in this colour, my photo really doesn’t do it justice but it’s a lot better than the swatch.

Yesterday was my knitting class, apart from the ongoing problems we seem to be having coordinating my class attendance and Isabelle’s bedtime it went much better than last week. Last week you will recall Jesse called me half an hour early asking where I was and the teacher seemed kind of rude. This week I got home on the dot of 8:30 and found Isabelle was still eating dinner! The class was great though. There were less students, which always helps, but I was at a much better point with my projects to feel like I was really learning something. I learned to use DPNs:

Quite possibly I could have picked this up from a book or the internet like everything else but I have to say that this is one thing I was very glad to learn from one-on-one, in person instruction. I could be wrong but it seems that using DPNs is made harder than usual by my particular style of continental knitting and I would not have liked to figure out how to manage all those needles on my own. The other thing I learned last night was how to make icord. I know I have instructions on how to make icord in most of my books but something about it fuddled my dyslexic brain, turns out it was so simple any idiot could do it!

In other news I have been making progress with my Booga Bag.

I haven’t been working that hard on it, mostly because I won’t be sure where to put the stripes until my contrast yarn arrives and I don’t want to find I have to rip back to get the effect I want. My other reason for being so slack this week is that my right forearm has been achy. I think the achy-ness is in part due to having some sort of virus at the moment, I have been a bit achy all over. However, the right forearm is definitely worse than the rest of me and I blame those 40cm 4mm circs I used to make the brown dish cloth. Now that I know how to use DPNs I don’t see myself ever using those needles again. I will order a longer 4mm circ sometime soon, which will presumably have longer needles and be more usable.

I cast on for a Booga Bag last night with my Rasberry Lambs Pride Worsted. These 6.5mm needles are the biggest I have ever used and they’re FUN. I finished the base last night, picked up stitches all the way round the base this afternoon (yay new skill!) and started knitting in the round for the first time ever (yay another new skill!). I think this project is going to be a quick knit. Well it would have been, had I not decided it needed a contrast colour. I called ThreadBear this morning and asked them to help me choose a suitable contrast. They choose Khaki, I could hear three of them all agreeing they liked it on the other end of the phone, I really hope I do too…. From what I could see online I had been thinking Limeaid or Victorian Pink but they told me the Limeaid was pretty lurid, which is what I was worried about. It is always so hard to tell on my laptop screen but we never really discussed the pink properly, I hope they didn’t think I was only interested in green and choose the best of a bad lot…Whatever the case it is done now and they are sending two skeins so I can make a second bag with Khaki as the main colour and for good measure I ordered a skein of Cascade 220 to make Sophie too.

I am a thirty year old woman without a handbag. In fact I have no bag of any kind other than my nappy bag and this thing here. I have always had accsesory issues, but the situation became dire when my last perfectly sized black leather back pack died, oh, probably a year ago now. Yes folks, I have let this problem fester for a year, or maybe more.

A bag is one of the few projects I would like to make that is likely to be significantly cheaper to knit for myself than to buy ready made, so I have been pouring over bag patterns and trying to choose yarn for weeks (months?). According to my local yarn store felting isn’t very popular here in Australia yet and they couldn’t recommend anything they stocked to make myself a felted bag. On their advice I decided my best option was to order some Lambs Pride from the US as pretty much all the patterns I liked seem to call for this yarn or similar. After agonising over a variety of websites that stock Lambs Pride and carefully comparing colour swatches I realised there was no real hope of getting an accurate idea of colours online and I just picked something that looked hopeful and prayed. It came in the post today and here it is:

I like it! Yay!! If only I still liked the pattern I had chosen when I ordered only two skeins….

I was planning on making a PackySack but now I am really not sure I like it. That I don’t like any of the colours used in the samples doesn’t help. This one here is pretty cute - only problem is the bag is supposed to be for me, not Isabelle.

Now that the yarn is here I think I want to make a Booga Bag, or possibly Lily.

The problem is that I probably have too little yarn for either of these bags. I have to go do some research and some maths… I like the plain red Lily shown in this photo better than the stripped verison on the pattern. If I do have enough Lambs Pride I think I will make Lily with the yarn I have, freeing me up to buy some Kureyon to make the Booga Bag in beautiful stripes.

UPDATE: Turns out Kureyon comes in 50g skeins, not 100g like Lambs Pride and Cascade 220. My two skiens of Lambs Pride will do nicely for a Booga Bag but fall a bit short of completing Lily - so a Booga Bag it is. If it works I will think about a second one in Kureyon.