Don't you just love my catching titles? LOL, ok not terribly original, but trying to find a word that rhymes with skull wasn't easy. Anyhoo, I finished my felted skull bag, pattern is again form the Hello Yarn website (http://www.helloyarn.com/bigskulltote.htm). Again a free pattern from the Hello Yarn Lady, she has the cutest things!This was my first foray into "stranding" and although I don't think I did a great job with it, it worked out fairly well. Given that the bag as knitted in the round, it was a little harder also. I will try it again with flat knitting. I used Patons wool yarn in worsted weight and it was knitted double strand through out. I added a crochet color border to the top to set it off a bit. I also made a mistake using the graph (there are skulls on both sides of the bag) and made one eye on one side to small (guess what! first time using a graph also)
. It looked like some kind of weird skull birth defect! So I used duplicate stitching to fix the eye before I felted the bad. It actually worked really well, and it was the first time I had used duplicate stitching also. After felting in one wash cycle, I stopped and noticed the skull was actually pulling inward on the back do to the stranding, so I pulled it as much as I could to stretch it out a bit on the sides of the skull. I took the picture after one felting cycle, but I'm toying with the idea of throwing it in f
or a second cycle to see what would happen. The Hello Yarn Lady said she used two cycles when felting her bag. Any way, here is what the bag looked like prior to felting, it was pretty big, and a close up of the graphic work for the skull.Don't know what I want to work on next, I don't like being without a project, since I don't like to watch TV without having something to do!
