Autumn has definitely arrived and so any journey outside
involves a warm and preferably waterproof coat, having an umbrella to hand if
not in hand, and occasionally a hat and gloves. This change in wardrobe also,
for me, involves a change in bag.
Gone are the carefree days when a bag slung over the
shoulder is a practical option. Bulkier clothing invariably means the bag
doesn’t really stay on my shoulder and when you then add in wrestling with an
umbrella in the elements or removing gloves in order to find door keys I tend
to seek something that, once shouldered, stays put.
It is therefore with some sadness that I say farewell to my
summer bag and dig out my more muted but practical and hands-free
cross-shoulder option. But before it spends the next 5 months in the cupboard I
thought it was a good opportunity to share it with you, not least because it is
hand made, but also because it also got quite a few compliments this year.
I would love to say that the bag was meticulously designed from
the outset, but the reality is the design evolved slowly. It started a number
of years ago when a friend returned from a business trip to Tallinn, Estonia
with a gift of two balls of rainbow-dyed yarn. It was 100% wool but treated in
a very different way from a ‘normal’ ball of wool you’d buy to knit or crochet
with. Without getting too technical, not least because I don’t really know any
great detail of what happens between shearing the wool off a sheep to buying it
in a shop to knit with, this wool was different in a number of ways. Although
dyed and carded (a process that
disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibers to produce a continuous web or
sliver suitable for subsequent processing*), very little else had been done to
it. A gentle pull of the yarn, a normal process when knitting or crocheting to
unravel a length from the ball to knit with, just resulted in the strands
breaking. I occasionally pulled out bits of grass or grass seeds from the
strands and my hands were always beautifully soft every time I worked with it
indicating that hardly any of the lanolin (natural oils in sheep wool) had been
washed out.
Anyway, the volume of wool I had and the huge fragility of
the strand led me to one conclusion – it would be perfect for felting or making
‘boiled wool’. This would help deal with its fragile nature but only if I could
knit it into a shape first. This I did carefully and whenever a strand broke I
resisted tying a knot and just placed the two broken strands side-by-side and
kept going. I’m sure this would have just unravelled if the knitted material
was the final product but I knew the ‘boiling’ process would hide any loose
strands and really ‘knit’ the fabric together. I cast on a random number of
stitches and knitted away in stocking stitch (knit a row, purl a row) until I
ran out of yarn.
I ended up with a very flimsy and fragile rectangle about
50cm square. It was only then that I thought it may make a bag of some sort but
the next step was to felt or boil it. This was a complete act of faith because
I tossed it into the washing machine and turned the temperature dial up to 95°C.
Fortunately, this resulted in a lovely, rainbow-hued rectangle of boiled wool
but with a slightly curled edge on what was the cast-on and cast-off edges –
now measuring about 40cm square.
The rest was pretty straightforward. I joined the side seams
and then sewed across the bottom corners to give the finished bag a third
dimension. I made two strips of cotton into the handles and sewed them onto the
wool. For the inside of the bag I took a
piece of fabric that approximately measured the same size as the original piece
of boiled wool and joined it at the top with a zip and a second one that was
slightly shorter. I placed the shorter
one inside the larger one and sewed up all the side seams before slip stitching
into the main bag opening around the zip. This gives the bag three internal
compartments as the smaller zipped section essentially divides the main lining
into two.
I hope you love it as much as I do. Just don’t ask me to
make another, or if you do, don’t expect it to turn out the same!
*With thanks to Wikipedia!
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