Felted bags

A few weeks ago I made a few bags. This pattern caught my eye a while back but I was not keen to cut up any of my dresses to make it! This is the Sack Dress Sack. You can find the FREE crochet pattern over at CrochetMe at http://crochetme.com/sack-dress-sack. Very easy to make and quite cute. I used two skeins (two threads of yarn held together and worked at the same time) of Elle Gold yarn, a local yarn that is really lovely, in a bright peacock blue colour. I made the bag slightly bigger than the pattern calls for as I really hate small bags.

This is my first attempt from my new book "Knit-'n- Felt Bags". I really love this book! I did change the pattern a lot though. I felted the bag and now I wish I didn't. It did not come out as I hoped, but I can still use it.

This is the Gelato Bag to be found here in a kit form. http://www.fibertrends.com/product/56794/GB-K/_/Felt_Gelato_Bag_Kits_-_SPECIAL_PRICE. The bag is really small, so I made it a lot bigger. Also I did not have the 40cm (16") circular needles needed to start the bottom of the bag. A fruitless search locally for several weeks, made me order a full set of 40cm circular needles from a shop in the UK. Sadly, this parcel was posted several weeks BEFORE Christmas, and has STILL not arrived!

You use felting wool yarn held together with Mohair. This Mohair is really bad. Lovely but so bad. It fluffs and little pieces drift up your nose, in your mouth, all over. Then I am not even talking about what it does when felted in your washing machine! Fortunately I read up on this before I attempted felting it and decided to put the bag in a thicker pillowcase when felting it. The fluff that came from that bag was unbelievable! And it still got through the pillowcase onto the towel, jeans and other stuff I added to the wash. The pre-felted bag was HUGE.

I am quite pleased at the end result though. It shrunk less than the wool yarn normally does. All the yarn I used was local. The Mohair affects the felting process quite a lot. You can still see stitch definition, which I am not so fond of, but it's still nice. And fluffy. A lot of fluff! I still need to finish it off with a nice button and magnetic snap before I can use it. Not with a dark outfit though. I will be covered in fluff in no time.

For the life of me, I cannot remember now which pattern I used for this bag! I will have to look it up and post again on this one. I still need to take a picture of the finished version of this bag after felting, which sadly, did not go so well. Oh, it felted beautifully, but it shrunk plenty! The bag is so small now, my purse won't even fit! I do love the handle and bead effect that I made although the beads did not withstand the heat in the washing machine so well either.

I also made some lovely jersey knit tops recently that I still need to take pics of. I will post again next week and share some of these projects. And of course, I still want to make tops from my two new patterns I purchased recenlty from Sewingpatterns.com.

Hope you all have a great weekend!