Finished knit bag

The knit bag I last wrote about is done, complete with drawstrings, lining and tassels, just in time for out local 12th Night and the gift basket it is destined for.  Yay!

Overall, I'm fairly pleased with it though it has a few composition problems.  It's too long for one thing, and something about the color transitions bugs me.  It looks better in photographs than in person.  Possibly the problem is just that I had the wrong shade of green.  Whatever, it's not that bad and I don't think it will annoy anyone other than me.  I've already started another bag in wool, just to use up some of the wool I already have, and get a little more complex colorwork practice in before I jump into the silk or cotton.  Since the fine silks the original relic bags were knit with is so expensive, I'm thinking I may do one or two with pearl cotton first, or maybe bamboo, as practice, before I invest in lots of expensive silk.  We'll see, I have other things to get done before I get to that.

Knitting!

One of the problems with this whole middle ages thing is that there are not a lot of things to knit, at least not until you get to the 16th century and even then all we really have any evidence for are socks and the odd mitten or cap.  I hate knitting socks, and most of the caps are kind of masculine looking looking, which leaves me with mittens.  How many pairs of mittens does one girl need, really?

As it turns out, there are four or five really lovely knitted silk relic bags in Sion which date to the 14th century!  Hurray!  Finally something to knit that is not a sock!  Luckily I don't mind the intricate color work too much, it's actually kind of fun, and surprisingly mindless if you aren't too worried about slavishly copying one of the extant bags.  I need to make some things for a largess basket for out local Twelfth Night event and fill out my prize stash (I don't like presenting prizes naked if I can help it, depending on the prize anyway) so I've decided to do at least one of these bags in wool as a sort of experiment.  So far so good, I am pleased with how it's turning out and I think once the little bag is done and gets all it tassels it will be quite pretty.

I've already got plans for at least one more, done in wool again, and am considering doing one in bamboo silk (since I have a bunch of it lying around) before I spring for real silk.  Keeping the tension even in silk might be a little trickier than wool,  which has enough natural stretch that it's pretty easy to keep the stitching even but I've done bead knit bags in cotton that I think I can manage it.

In looking over my blog posts and project progress for the last year, I'm feeling very discouraged and disappointed in myself.  I have not gotten nearly as much done as I had wanted to.  A huge part of the problem has been lack of energy.  So much of my creative energy in the last year has gone into my business and into projects for other people and for the barony that not much has been left for myself.  The business and commissions are rewarding and energizing in their own way, but all the work I did on the regalia and everything else for the barony was really draining.  This next year, I need to work on finding better balance so I don't kill myself trying to help people who won't appreciate it or getting myself into situations where I just feel taken advantage of.  That's not very inspiring.

Monmouth Cap and MOL Mittens

Here they are in their glory!  I will post the documentation as soon as it gets a once over from a fresh set of eyes.  This is my entry for this weekend's raw wool challenge.  I spun the wool quite awhile ago, and just did the dying (my latest experiments with madder which I posted about recently).

I like that the hat and mittens are more functional and less fashionable, things an ordinary working person might have had.  Or a kid out for a romp in the snow.  In this case, an over-sized kid, but certainly not the little lordling I'm usually trying to dress.  The mittens are ambidextrous too, which just goes to show that Elizabeth Zimmerman's suggestion to knit mittens in sets of 3's might have been around for a good long while.  We have this one because a kid dropped it in a field after all.

Now I should just have time to get to activities night tonight and get myself packed up for the weekend in the morning without a huge rush!  Or at least not any more than the usual amount of rush.  Thankfully the doctors appointment that was scheduled for tomorrow late in the afternoon got moved to yesterday, so I am free to leave whenever I am ready and will be able to beat some of the traffic.  As long as I get there in time to set the tent up in daylight I will be doing ok.

Knitting frustration

A quick post to say that my project for this weekend's event (hah, nothing like the last minute you say?) is, in typical form, not going well.  The mitten portion is done and looks wonderful, the hat is giving me grief.  I was going to do a flat cap and got halfway done with the crown (those buggers take For.Ev.Er. to knit BTW) when I realized I wasn't going to have enough yarn to finish no matter what I did.  Gah.  So, I frogged the whole thing yesterday and started on a Monmouth cap.  Still a hat, still a different gauge than the patterns out there so it's not a too-easy knitting part of the project, and I should be able to get it done pretty fast and not run out of yarn this time.

It's also still boring as hell to knit, like most period European knit (except the Sion bags), and means I have to start over on my hat portion of the documentation.  Sigh.  I can do this, right?  It's not a huge A&S event, I don't need a 20 page opus or anything and there's the spinning and dying and wool processing part to talk about and that none of that has changed.  Just the knitting.

Did I mention it was boring to knit?  Just round after round of boring old stockinette.  Sure, there's some vaguely interesting construction with the brim but I've done that sort of thing before so it's rather lost it's glamor and besides which, that's hardly enough to make a vast expanse of stockinette interesting.  It would probably be soothing and mindless if I didn't have to worry about writing up the documentation as well.