/karen/

Booga bag

Saturday, 28 June, 2008

I've had a few knitting projects recently which haven't quite turned out as nice as I'd like them to be. Chief among these was this Entrelac bag I was trying to make. I was trying to learn two new skills—Entrelac (where it looks woven) and felting (which is really called fulling). I got the Entrelac part down pat—

—but then realised you can't felt entrelac because it will just go fuzzy and you won't be able to see it. Well, correction: you can felt entrelac, but unless you've done it in different colours like this, there's probably no point.

Sighing at my own stupidity, I put the entrelac bag aside. I know I'm going to have to unpick it as some stage because it's not quite working as a bag, but I tend to leave projects which I regard as having sort of “failed” in favour of picking up something else that I can actually do. While surfing the web, I found a pattern for this Booga Bag and it looked quite easy. And it involved felting—something I keep talking about and then never doing.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a “before” shot. But imagine something that looks a bit like this (minus the handles)

but in this colour:

(It's Rustic Red Tweed, 12ply, shade 963, dyelot 050.)

I spent most of last weekend knitting this bag using 6.5 mm needles. It knits up quite fast. The i-cord I finished after church which perplexed some of the Wild Street folk (“What are you knitting?” “A long piece of rope.”) I-cord is like the knitting you used to do on a Knitting Nancy except you do it on two double-pointed needles. This one required a five-stitch i-cord to the length of 180 cm.

On Wednesday I had a bit of time and so decided to have a go at felting the bag. I set the washing machine to “hot” and “low”, put in a bit of wool wash (I think I used wool wash), and then, when the tub was full, I added a pair of jeans and the bag plus i-cord in one of those zippered wash bags.

I left it on the agitation part (the first part of the wash cycle which, on my machine, takes about 12 minutes). Every 12 minutes, I'd go back and turn the dial back to the beginning again (because you don't have to let your machine go through the entire wash cycle four or five times; that's not what the instructions mean! Plus it's a waste of water). It only took three turns of this to get it nice and felty.

Here's what it looked like when I pulled it from the machine (sorry about the flash).

Then I fiddled with the dials so that all the water drained out of the tub and then the tub re-filled with cold water (I left the jeans in there). Once the tub was full again, I put the wash bag with the knitting in it back in. The machine finished its cycle—rinsing and spinning out all the water. When it emerged, it looked like this:

That's quite a difference from the knitted swatch above!

The next step was to shove a cardboard box wrapped in a plastic bag into it and leave it to dry for two days:

I was so excited that it actually worked, I kept trying to speed up the drying process by putting it in rooms where the heater was on, or in that patch of sunshine on our dining table before we left for the day.

On Thursday night it was dry so I put the finishing touches on the bag. I took the i-cord (which had shrunk to about 120 cm) and snipped it clean in half according to the instructions (felting means that the fabric won't unravel if you cut it).

I then made holes in the bag as per the instructions. These are my 6.5 mm double pointed KnitPicks needles sticking out of the bag.

The holes really needed to be bigger than that, however, as the i-cord is thicker than 6.5 mm needles, so I ended up having to shove two of them in each hole, wiggling them around to make the holes bigger.

Then I threaded the i-cord through as per the instructions, and tied the knots at either end. The result was this very lovely bag:

I think I still need to line it (or, rather, it would be a good idea to line it if I don't want the inside to get damaged by pointy things like keys). But I need to work out how to do pockets in lining to keep things like mobiles, journals and pens from moving around. I'll have to think about that ...

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