Craptina: Les Bags

Congratulations to everyone who finished the Knitting Olympics!! Gold metals for the Spiders who competed because I was too lazy to even put the button my the blog, but I was rooting for you guys in my heart. Yesterday at The Point several spiders bound off their FBS. So congrautlations Stephanie and Katie for the gold metal on Team Lace.

I've been caught up on so many projects that I've been a bad knitter and have let quite a few fun things slide. I know there are many out there who want to see some shoes . And I know there are one or who who are wondering what ever happened to the sleeves. Well all of these projects have taken a back burner for the moment while I've been researching the possibitities of production knitting. I know I am a fast knitter but lately I've been wondering how fast. I decided I'd start off with some felted bags and test my skills. I found a few cute patterns, futzed with them a little and made some samples.

The first test was a disaster. 14 Hours total on size 8's, and a blob of a bag.

I increased the needle size 11's, and modified the shaping a bit, and this helped get the timing down to 8.5 hours. This bag was better, but not big enough. Still too wide.

This time I really played with the shaping of the base. After picking up stitches all around the base, I went up for 4 inches, then decreased every 5th stitch on the 30th row, to really pull in the shaping. I didn't time myself on this one, but I expect it was 7 hours at max.

It's hard to see the shaping from this picture (I put a squash in the bag to stand it up) but it's there. Now that I have the patten that I want I did another bag and timed myself to a record 4.45 hours. I'm researching for bigger, cheaper yarn, to keep playing with the pattern. Well see how these projects work out, who knows, maybe Craptina will get a label......