Summer Bag - farewell

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!