The body of Bella is done, handles and possibly even felting to be completed tonight. I am guessing that I have used less than half the ball of yarn Jesse and I wound with the drill and I am not loving it, the winding that is, the yarn is fine. It was all fine and dandy for the first 1/2 of the bag, possibly even two thirds, but suddenly my center pull ball stopped pulling. In the end I dragged a huge tangle out of the middle of my ball and painstakingly untangled it before I could get back to my scheduled knitting. Ever since then I have also had to carefully mind not to create another tangle. The lesson here is that the drill most likely does not belong in my knitting tool kit…While I am sure that better technique feeding the yarn onto the ball could probably eradicate this problem but I won’t be trying again anytime soon. The only yarn I have in need of winding at the moment is the ColdHarbour Mill for French Market Bag #1. I have to decided to deal with this by knitting bag #2 first and then prevailing upon my Gran to wind my ColdHarbour for me (or allow me to do it at her place) when we are in Adelaide next week.

Speaking of the French Market Bags, I have a problem - you see the 4.5mm needles called for in the pattern seem awfully small to me. I swatched the 5 ply yarn I am using for Bella on 4.5mm, 5.5mm and 6.5mm needles and got the best fabric from the 6.5mm’s so it just seems odd to me to knit significantly heavier yarn on smaller needles. What’s that, do I hear you saying “just swatch with bigger needles”? Well I would, BUT the real problem here is that I want my Market Bags as much taller than the pattern as my yarn will allow. It is my intention to knit the handles before starting the body so that I can then knit right to the very last scrap of yarn on the body of the bag. I don’t want to waste any yarn swatching, it’s nto like I can rip it out and reuse it after its gone through the washer now is it…. I can swatch for bag#2 because I can easily get an extra ball of Jo Sharp both quickly and fairly cheaply and I can return it if it turns out I really didn’t need an extra ball after all. Not so the ColdHarbour which has to be ordered from the UK and comes in 100g hanks instead of 50g balls. So even if I swatch and recalculate for the Jo Sharp bag on 6.5mm needles what should I do about the ColdHarbour version? Apparently all yarns felt differently and while I could just assume that if I knit on different size needles to the same pre felted dimensions it would be ok my Bella swatch tells me different - the Bella swatch shrank more the looser the gauge…

I could just knit the ColdHarbour bag on 4.5s as called for in the pattern. My reasons for wanting to use bigger needles are two fold - firstly I liked that there was less stitch definition on bigger needles with my Bella swatch and secondly I am time challenged (christmas is looming) and bigger needles = less stitches = faster project. What would you do?

I won’t be needing 90 rows for the body of the bag. 90 rows of garter stitch maybe, but since I am knitting stocking stitch it won’t be 90 rows… This is 25 so I am guessing somewhere between 50 and 60.

I feel so grown up, not only did I swatch for Isabelle’s bag (which shall hence forth be known as Bella) last night, I also felted my swatch. Does it say something about what sort of grown up I will be that my swatch tells me lots, but not enough? Not enough to be SURE of what I am doing.

It tells me that the fabric is just as nice, if not nicer on 6.5mm needles as 4.5. There is actually less stitch definition the bigger the needles get. So my swatch helped me choose needle size and the good news is that the 6.5’s were the needles that appealed to both my lazy and stingy streaks (bigger needles = faster, plus I don’t have the right length circ in the other sizes and I don’t have 5.5 mm DPNs either). Unfortunately I was getting worried about wasting yarn by the time I got brave enough to try the 6.5mms so it is the shortest part of the swatch and I don’t know if I should trust the results.

The swatch is 27 stitches, maybe 26. I thought I had 27 but I forgot to count them again before casting off and when I counted the bumps I kept getting 26. So it started off like this: 24 rows of 4.5mm needles was 5 inches wide and 5.5cm long. Yes, I really did measure one width in inches and length in centimeters. Don’t ask. 16 rows of 5.5mm needles was 6 inches wide and 4cm long. 11 rows of 6.5mm needles was 6.25 inches wide and 3.25cms long. Note the progressive slackness of my swatching, less and less rows as I went along….

I was scared of waking Isabelle with the washer when I was done knitting it, so I tried felting it on the stove. This did not work. AT ALL. So I got desperate and whacked it in the washer - 75 degrees Celsius on cycle #7 with the quick wash button pressed in and a nappy for company, no zippered envelope was used and I think it is just about perfect:

It is now like this:
4.5mm section 3.625?/4.5cm
5.5mm section 3.875?/3cm
6.5mm section 4.25?/2.4cm

Which my calculator tells me gives the following percentages of original size after felting:

4.5mm section 72.5%/81%
5.5mm section 64%/75%
6.5mm section 68%/73%

But I don’t think I am going by percentages anyway, I think I am best off going by stitches/rows and the post felting dimensions. So here is my pattern:

use provisional cast on to cast on 3 stitches, knit 14 inches icord. Make 3 more the same.
cast on 38 stitches
knit 16 rows garter stitch
pick up 8/38/8 stitches
knit 90 rows in the round
divide icords into pairs, twist together and choose positions for handles
cast off between handle positions leaving 4 stitches for each handle insertion
graft handles on with two stitches each of the two icords overlapping
felt it

I have no idea if any of this will work, I am aiming for a bag 6 inches wide, 7 inches tall and about 1.5 inches deep with two twisted icord handles (one front, one back). Anything approximating these dimensions will do.

I forgot to mention the best part of the swatching process. I left it out on the couch overnight for Isabelle to find. I heard her exclaiming as soon as she went into the lounge and she was saying “These colours are PRETTY” all the while jabbing the swatch with her delicious little fingers.

It was too late to write more last night, but really a drill makes a pretty good yarn winder. Ours does anyway - it can go much slower than either of the mixers, but the biggest plus is that it can go backwards so a mistake feeding the yarn onto the ball is easily fixed. I think we will try it at least once more and see if it saves time without all the mixer disasters slowing the process down.

I went yarn shopping yesterday, as you may have guessed from the hank that got wound last night (which is destined to be a bag for Isabelle btw). While I was there I also bought 6 balls of Jo Sharp DK to make a second French Market Bag. That’s right I am buying yarn for the second bag before even starting the first, but I just had to buy it yesterday, honest. one of the other students at knitting class on Wednesday had a sample of felted Jo Sharp DK and I instantly decided it would be easier to get the yarn for the second bag locally, preferably while it was on sale at my LYS. Which meant dragging Isabelle to the yarn store yesterday…. In the end I wasn’t happy with what I chose so I went back again today, this time with TWO toddlers. I gave them a bag of tiny teddies each the second we walked in the door and came away with this:

This I am happy with. Am I ashamed to have bribed them with chocolate biscuits? Not at all.

Pattern: Reverse Bloom Wash Cloth - Interweave Knits Winter 2003
Yarn: Jo Sharp Soho Cotton, colour #220 “Poppy”
Needles: 4mm/60cm Tulip bamboo circular, 4mm/40cm Addi Natura circular, 4mm Addi Bamboo DPNs

The christmas “to do” list is shrinking!

There is so much going on today I don’t know where to start.

Pattern: Sophie Bag
Yarn: Cascade 220, colour #9407 (green)
Needles: 6.5mm/40cm Crystal Palace Bamboo Circular, 6.5mm Tulip Bamboo DPNs

Sophie is done and I have reorganised my gallery a little so that she will actually appear at the top of my FO list instead of the bottom. Following on from changing format of the FO page, I have also decided to fiddle about so that recurring projects like wash cloths could appear in both the “Finished Objects” and “On the Needles” lists. Speaking of wash cloths:

The Reverse Bloom Wash Cloth is progressing and I really do hope tonight will be my last night working on it. I think it will be pretty and I will be pleased to give it as a gift to someone but I don’t know if I will be in a rush to make another one soon. I think the thing that is bothering me about the Reverse bloom Washcloth is that the knitting is very simple but the project is rather fiddly. It seems to me that 12 ends to weave into a wash cloth is about 10 too many. I have actually woven the ends already because on such a small project it was a real pain having them tangling up all the time.

The ColdHarbour Mill Aran yarn I ordered has arrived and I am very happy with it. The colours are not what I expected, having far less blue in them than I anticipated but I am very happy none the less. The yarn is lovely and I am really looking forward to knitting it up!

ColdHarbour also sent the colour card I requested. In keeping with their website which claims to be an internet store but has only the names of their yarn colours with no pictures (and requires that you call them to order but doesn’t provide a phone number on the shop page), their colour card doesn’t have names attached to the colours. So now I know there are lots of colours I like, but not what they are called. I can guess of course but what if I am wrong? I am not one of those people who is good at describing colours so I am quite worried about calling up and actually trying to sort out which colour is which over the phone…

I decided to try out the Reverse Washcloth pattern in Jo Sharp SoHo Cotton. It’s not what the pattern calls for, but so far so good. I knit most of the first petal three times before being sure I was happy with the result. The combination of this pattern and the cotton yarn being quite unforgiving means it has been better to start the current petal from scratch if I make even a small mistake - so the third petal got redone twice too. Each petal is quick to knit, so lets I hope I don’t have to knit the next two petals more than once and I could be done tonight.

Cloth nappies (diapers if you are in the US) make great washing machine companions for the felting object. I decided to brave my own frontloader which ruled out using jeans for fear of them shrinking or bleeding onto Sophie. While I was busy trying to figure out what I could use that was absolutely colour fast and could be hot washed I noticed the nappy bucked needed emptying. So into the washer went the nappies. First I washed them on their own, ’cause ewwww, and then in went Sophie. I set the machine to its shortest cycle (about 45 mins) on 50 degrees Celsius with no spin and she felted well. There were a few spots that weren’t quite done so I ran second cycle the same and I am fairly happy with the result. There are a few strange sort of creased spots which I am hoping will improve with blocking and perhaps a bit of ironing. I am thinking about trying without the zippered pillow case next time, perhaps a little hotter.

Do I put her in my front loader? Or boil her on the stove? Or take her to the laundromat? That remeains to be seen.