Celtic Tote - My First FO of 2008

After some knitting, cabling, embroidery and a little felting later, here she is....

This really was a great project. It was just the right amount of cabling and the carts where so easy to read. The finishing was entertaining. And the felting simple. I chose to knit the body of the bag in about 2 1/2 skeins of Lamb's Pride Worsted in Oregano. I love this green. It is simultaneously dark and yet has a great way of brightening up in natural light (as you can tell from the above photo).

You can also see that in the end, I opted for a bright yellow as my accent color. When I decided to go lighter with the accent color, I still had a tone-on-tone thing going in my head (hence the initial kiwi green choice), so it took a while to really be comfortable with the yellow. Once I knew the green on green wasn't doing it for me, I gravitated towards a rusty orange that ended up just making the bag look dirty. The yellow brings a whole new feel to the bag and one I certainly never planned when I started this project. But, boy am I happy with it! So, B gets another tally point next to his name for coming up with such a great alternative.

When I started the embroidery process, the plain backstitch was fairly subtle. I knew when I decided to change up my color choice that I wanted the accent color to be very visible, so I did a modified backstitch where I overlapped the stitches a bit. It ended up making the embroidery look like a little rope outlining the cable. Because of this change, I probably used more of my accent color that what you would normally use, about 1/2 a skein of the Wild Mustard Lamb's Pride Worsted.

I also added a fabric lining so that I could use this as a regular purse. My lining came from some leftover Kaffe Fassett fabric in my stash that had exactly the same green as the yarn. I also made some pockets in the front and back of the lining so that things like my keys and phone would be easy to find in a hurry.

The only other thing I did differently was use a piece of flexible cutting board for the bottom instead of the plastic mesh. I have to give Cora the credit for this idea, which was perfect because I happened to have a seldom used flexible cutting board exactly the right length.

Given all the stash components of this bag (main yarn, fabric lining and base), the project ended up costing about $8.50 for the new hank of yellow Lamb's Pride and the button. Not a bad deal for a new bag!