Feeling the need to Felt October 6, 2005
I’ve been wanting to try felting for a while - even bought 2 books on Amazon - but just hadn’t got around to it. Then I decided that I need a wee bag to use at lunchtimes during the week. You see, normally I carry a backpack to work with my laptop in it and when I go out at lunchtime I have to carry my wallet, phone and work id in my hand, which is awkward.
Yarn is a new Australian knitting mag that’s just started and I liked the look of the bag patterns in their online sample issue. So I thought I’d give the mitred stripes tote a whirl. I didn’t follow the stripe pattern - just made up my own and I used up some Panda Woolbale yarn I had left over from a long abandoned project.
I’ve taken some crappy photos of it and I didn’t think to put something in the shot for pre & post felting size comparison, so just imagine that the felted version is about 75% the size of the unfelted one.
Here it is pre-felting:
And post-felting:
I did the felting in the washing machine. I washed it in hot water for about 30 minutes before letting the wash cycle finish. I might have managed to make it smaller if I’d keep going, but I doubt it and I’m pretty happy with the size of it. It’s not the little spare bag I want to stuff in my back pack to use at lunchtimes, but it will be handy all the same.
Very nice! Want one… There’s quite a nice felted bag in Stitch ‘n Bitch nation, but I haven’t been brave enough to try it yet.
I quite like the look of the finished article. So do you just knit something then wash the hell out of it?
Tim, kind of, yes. You knit something large and loose and then shrink it on purpose. The idea is to make the wool fibres bind together to make and denser fabric.
i see! so that time i washed my groovy op-shop home-knitted school jumper and it shrunk like a twisties bag in an oven, i could have just called it felting, not an embarrassing domestic disaster?