Phew, another FO!!!

May I present the finished tweed messenger bag?

Looks pretty good, no? By that I mean it looks like a square, and not like a parallelogram, which is what it looked like the first time I sewed the damn lovely thing together. I actually finished the bag last week, and then attempted to sew it together whilst watching The Godfather Part II last Saturday night. I sewed the small front piece to the strap first, and my stitches were tight, and it looked lovely. Then I got to the back part, which obviously needed to line up with the front piece in the corners. So, I did a bit of a pinning job, and got to work. Around the first corner I realized things might be slightly off, but I perservered, thinking that it wasn't bad and I could compensate across the bottom of the bag so the other corner would line up. If you're guessing that didn't work all that well, you would be correct. But, I sewed up the whole thing and stuffed the Lady E in, just to make sure it was as crooked as it appeared, and, why yes, it was! Sorry I didn't take any photos, but I really couldn't face the thing, so I ripped it apart (shame on me for having such nice tight stitches - the thing was really difficult to undo) and buried under my Poang chair until Tuesday night knitting club rolled around. Tuesday night, with some help from Rachel, I did a better job of lining it up and pinning it together, and resewing. And it is finished!!!

Project Specs: Tweed Messenger Bag

From Family Circle Easy Knitting, Holiday 2004

Yarn: Tahki Soho Tweed (?), 4 skeins? (been so long I don't remember)

Needles: 10.5 straights and circular

Time on the needles: Nov. 2004-April 2006 (eep)

Modifications: My gauge was off so my bag is slightly larger than the pattern, but who cares. I also made the strap much shorter than they suggested, because the pattern called for 80 inches, and that was ridiculous. I think mine is less than 60" and that is probably too long.

I'm counting this as finished because the knitting is done, but really I won't be using it until I find my ideal liner fabric and sew that in.

I've just realized that most of my posts lately have been finished objects (or stash, but that's another story). The casual observer might think that I knit like the wind and finish things all the time. But, really the only reason I'm finishing all these projects is that they were started long ago and were lanquishing in various knitting baskets until Pam made me give up new projects for Lent. With nothing else to work on, and the fire in the fingers, I had to work on all these assorted abandoned projects, so they've actually been getting finished. In fact, I only have two things left on the needles, one of which I can't blog about (to protect the innocent), and the other which is my blue Hike sweater from Rowan 37. On Wednesday Dave convinced me that even though I didn't want to, and even though the thought of all the stockinette was making my cringe, working on the sweater was the right thing to do. So I did, and Wednesday night I finished the second sweater front and started the first sleeve, and by today I am about 8 inches into the sleeve and moving along quickly. I'll try to get some photos up shortly, hopefully tomorrow as I will be out of town on Monday/Tuesday at a scientific retreat.

Tomorrow a bunch of my friends and I are taking a private spinning class for Rachel's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY RACHEL!!!). We've all been looking forward to this for months, and it should be a hoot. I'll do my best to document the occasion...