To felt… or better yet not to felt.

A tale of felting woe. Why is that when we try to make something nice for a baby, things start to go so wrong?

I am a big fan of the book Knitting for Baby. I have used it to make baby blankets, baby hats, and even little furry animals. So when my roommate, wanted to make a gift for her best friend’s new baby, I threw the book at her. “Everything in here is great,” I said. Since the projects I knit from this book were some of my first projects and I had no problems with them, I still think the directions are well written (heck – this book taught me short rows!). My roommate chose to make a
felted diaper tote with two large pockets on the outside. I doubt that I will ever get around to scanning the photo in the book so i will just describe it to you. It is shown with its two short handles slung over a woman’s shoulder. It looks to be about 24 inches long and about 18 inches high. The contrasting colored pocket on the outside is almost as big as the entire side of the bag, and there are pockets on each end of the bag.

So my roommate started searching high and low for an affordable, feltable yarn in good colors. She decided on some reynolds Lopi bulky in green and yellow and ordered it from Yarn Forward. It arrived, and to our disappointment the yellow was a oldy-greeny-yellowed tarnished kind of color. So she traded that away to a friend and ordered some bright yellow. The colors looked good.

For the next several months it was her only knitting project*. She brought it to knitting circle, worked on it in front of the TV, and plowed ahead even though she was really really sick of seed stitch. It was really a lot of knitting. Finally, she had all the pieces made to the dimensions required in the pattern. she sewed it up and was ready to felt. Amazingly, she took before and after photos. Now i know this is something i would have done, and i probably urged her to do so, but i don’t remember, i think she might have just done it. and lucky for us, too because now we can witness the tragedy.

Before: Notice how the bag covers the entire chair, and is approximately
square.

so she threw it in the washing machine a few times, added a ton of detergent, put it on hot. all the things you are
supposed to do (and all the things you need to do to felt in our friend’s machine). but nothing was happening. “Oh, just throw it back in,” I told her. “My booga bag took forever to felt.” (because it did ). then, it finally felted a little bit, but it seemed uneven. “Throw it in again!” I told her. It came out looking a little weird, but was still definitely too big. so… that’s right… she threw it back in. After an unknown number of iterations, the bag looked hideous. “Should I just felt it some more?” she asked me. At this point I was thinking that the felting was really just making everything worse. And though i never
told her this, at this point i thought that maybe i shouldn’t have been so zealously telling her to keep felting it over and over. But that’s what I do – make myself part of the problem.

After:

The bag did most of its shrinking in the vertical direction. It did almost no shrinking around the top, so that the idea of actually containing something in it is almost laughable. even the handles felted unevenly. they twist up, and are no longer the same length as each other.

my roommate never sent the bag to her friend. i think she just didn’t have time to write the accompanying
letter explaining what it was supposed to be, and how it got the way it is. I am all for sending the thing as far away from our house as we can get it. When we bring it out to gawk at with our knitting friends, the conversation usually goes
something like this:

knitter: What kind of bag is it supposed to be?
roommate: A diaper bag for my friend who is having a baby.
knitter: well you could certainly carry babies in it, but i don’t know about
diapers.< here it is "in action" ( the action would refer to the only thing it does: sit around and be really disproportionate):

It is hard for us to look at this bag, because it just reminds us of the other unholy baby gifts we have knit (for
example the horrific baby booties).

I know there there are other knitters with felting horror stories…. If you want to read/see another one, I found this yesterday. AND…. i have one more felted
bag tale of horror, but you will have to wait for another day.

*I don’t know how she does it, butI have never seen my roommate have more than 1 knitting project at a time.
weird.