Knit One, Purr Too

Satchel

Yesterday Richard emailed me to ask when I was going to post pictures of the felted messenger bag I'd made for him. I told him I would post pictures as soon as he gave the bag back to me to take pictures in the first place. Heh.

So anyway, here it is in all its fuzzy, felted glory, posing on the downstairs cat tree because, well, it was there.

Notice the Serenity pin on the outer flap. Shall I make you all jealous? We saw Serenity (the verison that will be released this Friday) two weeks ago (and it's awesome!).

Here it is with the front flap open, in order to show the pockets. I'm not sure there was any way to block those pockets so they were perfectly square - the felted material is *very* thick. But even though they're a little lopsided, they're just big enough for him to tuck pens and pencils and electronic gadgets inside (in fact there's a pen peeking out the top of one of the pockets in the picture).

All the gory details - the pattern is Knitty's Satchel. I used Peruvian Highland Wool from Elann.com in the darkest color they had. I ordered 16 skeins and I did have to start on the last two (you knit this with two strands held together), although I have most of those last two skeins left. I used size 13 needles and pretty much ignored the suggested guage because, well, it was going to be felted so I really didn't care. It took twice through the washing machine to reach the perfect size (and amazingly, it then fit perfectly over an old Fed Ex box, which we have since squirreled away for blocking purposes the next time this bag needs to be washed). Doing the I-cord bind-off was fun because I got to learn how to do something new, but if I ever do this again in a solid color, I'll just do a regular bind-off - once it was felted you can't really tell the difference, and a regular bind-off would go a *lot* faster.

I am now pondering making one for myself, although I think I'd go with something a little brighter in color, and I'd likely do the smaller version with a few extra pockets. It's mostly boring stockinette, yes, but on size 13's it knits up extremely fast, and there's something that's rather fun about blithely tossing something made of wool into the washing machine with the deliberate intent of shrinking it into oblivion.

Posted by Jenipurr at September 28, 2005 07:00 AM