Bag Lady

Like most knitters, I have devoted my life to the quest for the perfect knitting bag.  About every six or eight months, I fall out of love with my current solution and decide there Has To Be a Better Way.  I have tried designer bags, utility bags, fancy-pants bags, no-frills bags, and bagmaster 2000s.  All of therm are both perfect, and totally useless, depending on what I'm trying to stuff into them.  My most recent crusade has been for something that is Big Enough.  By big enough, I mean that I have been experiencing trouble with the size of my projects, relative to the size of my bag.  It turns out that a man's size large top-down raglan turtleneck takes up more room in one's knitting bag than one might think.  It also has a tendency to squish the PB & J you threw in there for lunch, and to obliterate any chance you had of finding/answering your cell phone before it stops ringing. 

I was in denial about this problem for a long time, because I had such high hopes for my current specimen.  The thing cost a fortune: it could be described as a status knitting bag, and I saved up for it for quite a little while, telling myself it would be worth it because this one was finally going to fulfill the quest.  It's a fine vehicle, and sexy, too - non-knitters are always complementing me on it - but I have been asking too much of it.  I realized this when an abrupt stop in the car sent the bag flying off the front seat, vomiting its contents all over my car.  It was open, of course, because the project du jour was too fat to close it.  I snapped (again):  There Has To Be a Better Way.

I carefully researched the options available (again), weighed them against the knitting budget (whose first priority must always be Yarn Procurement), and determined (again) that I was hosed.  The bag I wanted to try not only exceeded my allowance, it's unavailable until its maker catches up a backlog of orders that she noted on her website sometime during the Clinton administration.  And I wasn't sure it was the right answer for me anyway. 

So for the cost of about half of the backordered bag, and one (albeit precious) weekend, I broke down and made this:

It can do this:

And also this:

That is a full-size Peace Fleece cardigan in progress, in there: the biggest thing I had available to try it out with.  The cardi does not have sleeves yet, but there is still gobs of room in there for them, and all the yarn for the whole project, too.  Could probably fit some small children in there as well, while I'm at it.  This thing is Commodious.  It has all the pockets I wanted, in all the right (I think) places - note easy access to cell phone on the right, and business card case on the left.  And the lining is light-colored (silk dupioni, no less - why not?) so I can see all the way to the bottom.  The old-school top dowels keep it stable, and the leather bottom feels nice and looks tough.

Pleased with myself?  Heck Yeah.  Getting curvature of the spine from carrying it much?  Probably.
 

Homecoming

Phillip is sick.  And by that I mean that he has saved up about five winters' worth of head colds and minor irritations in order to experience them more fully, all at once.  Dude can be very efficient.  This would be the classic, wretched, late-winter flu and he has been on his face with it for no less than five days.  Which means that I am effectively a working single parent this week, with the added bonus of nursing duties.  In Sickness and in Health.  Whatever: This Blows.  Oh, and I really need to review and return about 100 pages of tech edits to my publisher.  Yesterday.  And the hacking cough of Certain People who are in the same room with me has kept me awake all night for about a week, so you can sprinkle sleep deprivation into the Gloom Stew we're cooking at our house, as well.

So I arrived home last night after an exceptionally long day at work,  struggled to divest myself of coat, purse, laptop, and keys.  An unusually loud racket coming from the living room should have motivated me to turn right around and leave again.  Instead I followed the din and surveyed the wreckage:

1.  Five children, only some of whom belonged to me, feasting on Cub Scout fund-raiser chocolate bars and pepperoni sticks in my living room.  The Universe has again spoken on my choice of white slipcovers.  Nice work, that.

2.  A sheepish-looking Scottish Terrier lurking near a suspicious puddle under my desk.  Evidently neither the Bed-Ridden nor the Chocolate-Besotted are functional dog walkers.  Brilliant.

3.  The 413th pile of tangled yarn this week: Unsupervised Kittens + Yarn = Carnage.

My instincts kicked in and I fled.  By which I mean that I sighed heavily and went to check the mail.

Then everything turned on a dime, because waiting for me at the mailbox was this:

And if that weren't enough, this:

Apparently, the Universe has not completely given up on me...

Flying Saucer

That's what Phillip called it when he saw the Noro beret drying on a dinner plate.  He's not wrong:

It borders on unnatural, how much time I spend looking for weird household items for blocking.  I am the self-proclaimed Crown Princess of Making Weird Towel Shapes to Block Stuff With.  As a late-stage convert (I only began to understand the importance of blocking a couple of years ago), I have become a Blocking Zealot.  It's lame how long it took me to get a clue about blocking, having trained as a tailor.  Tailoring requires more than just a little steaming, thwacking, molding and otherwise sculpting of fabric, so you would think that knowledge would be more easily transferable to knitting.  But it wasn't until I had to study and write about it for the Master Knitter program that I really gathered brains.  Now I love to do it so much that no knitted item is safe, and no household implement, non-porus surface, or passing pet is sacred.  I'll block anything on anything.  My personal best was a combination of 6 washcloths and 2 balloons for a lace shrug with puffy sleeves.  Wish I'd had the presence to take a picture that time.

But back to the hat:  My kids are fighting over who gets it, which I take as a good sign.  I think it's okay as a first attempt, and I learned a lot about self-striping Noro.  There are things I will do differently next time, like chart a bigger, clearer motif.  I also would engineer a more interesting pattern for the crown.  I think I will also choose 2 really different colorways when I do this again, rather than two ends of the same skein.  I did myself no favors by going cheap on that one.  (Note To Self:  Since when are you scared to spend Money on Yarn?)  What I really enjoyed about this project was not having any idea what to expect as the colors changed on me.  I did not know what a control freak I am with regard to color.  I kept having to tell myself not to break the yarn and felt in a new color - MADE myself trust the progression of what was on the skein, just to see if I could stand it.  And I did!  I even was surprised by how much I liked some of the combinations that happened, notably yellow and burgundy.  These are two shades I almost never work with, and certainly not together.  But in context of the small space of a hat, I really liked the area where it happened.

Tomorrow I head for the garden spot that is Tacoma, Washington, for the Madrona Retreat therein.  I am so amped I can hardly keep it together.  My goal is to post on all four days, so stay tuned for reports on my adventures.  Reminders not to paint "Madrona Or Bust" on my car are probably needed.

In unrelated news, one of the projects has been cut from my book, and I am completely devastated.  I thought my skin was much thicker than that, but apparently not.  It's like loosing a toe.  I will live, but I think I will always miss it.  The good news is that the outcast project is going to be featured on my episode of Knitting Daily TV, whose theme, I'm told, will be "Fun With Color".  I think it will also be offered as a free pattern via the Knitting Daily Pattern Store, so it's future is by no means doomed.  Watch for it next November.  In the meantime I plan to Get Over It.  Knitting, after all, is not for weenies.  And wallowing in despair messes up your hair.