FINALLY I’m making some progress on the celtic knot felted bag! I’m feeling very relieved. I’ve got the hard part done, all five million miles of Icord has been needle felted to the bag. Now for the scary part, felting the whole thing… Since I’m pretty new at this it’s still nerve wracking and amazing. I did a test swatch where I tried out this technique that popped in to my head one night, so I know it can work… but, now I’m trying it on the real thing. But, it’s big and it took forever, and it would just suck to have it all go wrong now. I worry about the Icord pulling away, or the bag puckering beneath it, and I’m really not sure how the top edge of the bag is going to come out. Also, I’m not sure the bag itself is going to be quite as firm as I’d like, but I guess I should just wait and see…. For tonight I should just stay happy and positive that this part went well FINALLY!!!
It’s been sitting on my kitchen table just mocking me for weeks now…. I tired to pin up a celtic pattern back a while ago, realized the one I was going to try was just too hard, and also the two six foot lengths of Icord weren’t nearly enough. ugh. But, I sucked it up and went back to knitting “string” as my husband likes to tease me about (he teases that I’m so obsessed with knitting that if I can’t think of anything else to do I just knit string) and finally got a pattern that I thought would work. It was a little crazy for a while there. Cords and pins everywhere, not easy to get that foam block in there to get it all needle felted on. If I’m going to continue to make these, I think I’ll probably invest in a foam base that I can just slip the bag on to. Would have been MUCH easier. This time around I had a little oblong sqoosh pillow wrapped in two towels and all inside a pillow case. Then I propped the whole thing up in a large mixing bowl so I could work with it standing up on my table. That worked ok. But, it wasn’t quite firm enough to be stable, and was not a good surface to punch in to with the felting needle. Luckily it was loose enough that I could wiggle the foam block in to there. Took two days to get that all attached correctly. What a tangle!
Today has actually been pretty productive. I’ve also been working on a design for wedding invitations for my friend Amy recently, today I’m finally liking the way it’s going. Which is good, because I’m starting to run out of time. All in all, it’s been a good day in my little creative world. Wish me continued good luck with the felting….
