A friend of ours is going through a difficult time, so some of us have decided to make her an afghan, contributing an 8″ square each made from undyed handspun yarn. I haven’t felt much like spinning lately, so I went digging through my yarn stash. I had very little undyed handspun, but I found some oatmeal Blue Faced Leicester (one of my favourite breeds – soft and lustrous) that had been spindle-spun at demos soon after I learned to spin. It’s rather uneven, and overtwisted in places, which limited the kind of patterns I wanted to use. I spent a while trawling through Barbara Walker’s Treasuries, but finally decided I’d just do a simple seed stitch ‘square spiral’ on a stocking stitch ground.

This is just a quick entry to show off the finished bag, as I have to get ready to go out soon. To give an idea of scale, it is 3.5″ tall as shown.

I did want to do something more interesting with the ends of the drawstring, but I couldn’t find a suitable bead locally, and my attempt to create a ‘beaded bead’ in tubular peyote using the same beads as I used in the knitting were’t very successful. If I had more time, I’d keep trying with that, but I want to send it off tomorrow, so …

… though it looks more like a vase. It will, of course, soften up once it is handled. Now to make a drawstring for it.

Well, that was my answer, and the question was how to block a knitted lace bag that is a small cylinder with a curved bottom. I couldn’t just pin it out like a doily, but it definitely needed blocking. The soy sauce bottle was the closest I could find to the right diameter, the lump of clay gave the curved bottom, and wrapping them in plastic kept the bag clean. Next problem was that the crochet loop edging needed stretching too, so I looped some cotton warp yarn through the thread I’d already run though the crochet loops, through a loop tied around the neck of the bottle, back through the thread and so on, then once it was all in place, I tensioned it carefully. Since that description is probably clear as mud, here is a pop-up picture.

… so I thought I’d better put something up tonight. I’ve been working on a bag for another small bag exchange. I decided to knit rather than weave this time – knitted cotton lace, of course. I’m using 10/3 crochet cotton on 1.75 mm (US #00) needles. It looked a bit dull so I added some beads. The bottom is a standard ‘swirly’ doily centre with a few decreases to make it ‘cup’ rather than lie flat. Then I switched to Arrow Lace (from one of Barbara Walker’s Treasuries), adding a few seed beads to accent the pattern. I’ve finished the beading (unless I decide to add some to the border) but I haven’t decided where to go from here, except that I’m going to need eyelets for a drawstring. I’ll think about that tomorrow. The scan isn’t very good – the lace needs stretching and the beads don’t show up, so I needed to include a detail scan.