FO: Argyle Skull Satchel

Pattern: Satchel with Arrrgyle Socks Graph both modified to fit my needs.
Yarn: Lion Wool in Ebony, Cadet Blue, Lemongrass, Winter White.
Needles: size 10.5/6.5mm
Cast on: 11/3/07
Finished: 12/14/07 (it was done sooner but sat there for a while waiting for me to sew on the strap...)

I learned a lot from this project - mainly, what I will never do again, and what I will not do next time I knit a bag. I absolutely love the way the felted argyle pattern turned out, and may redo it on another bag some day. Perhaps I will gift this one to a non-knitter who won't notice it's many mistakes.

Which are:

• Applied i-cord edge... applied to the wrong side on the left and right sides of the flap. A shame, since the properly-applied edge looks so tidy, and the wrong side of it looks so crummy.
• Way too wide, not quite tall enough, flap too short, hangs all funny. I knit and felted 6 different swatches and crunched numbers for two days to make what I thought would be the perfect bag, but alas...

• Not so much a mistake, but the next bag I make like this will employ D-rings, dog-leash hooks (whatever they're called) and a canvas strap to save me the time and hassle of knitting/felting/blocking/sewing (then, oops! sewing on twisted and having to undo and redo and trim and then sew back on) a frigging strap.

Here is a shot of it in action!

And my Sears Catalog pose.

Tomboy Purse

I knit up the pieces of this "purse" a week or two ago, and then it was sitting on my nightstand waiting to be blocked. I've never blocked anything before, but I figured it would make life easier when it came time to seam this bad boy together. I blocked it last night and it's dry this morning. I am in awe of the magic of this blocking business! I can see now that a project or two of mine that I hated might have been salvageable if only I had taken the time to block them.

There they are blocking. I'm also still trying to figure out some of this blogging business. I've been on blogger for many years, but have recently switched from pc to mac, internet explorer to safari and then to firefox, photobucket to flickr (since that's required for ravelry) and mspaint to iphoto. It's a bit much and I'm getting frustrated. I recognize and appreciate the many attributes of the new stuff over the old, but it seems like flickr has an issue with iphoto, and blogger has an issue with flickr, and nobody wants to get along right now at 5:30am real quick before I have to go to work.

So yeah.