Pay-It-Forward #4: A knitted Lord of the Rings bag

Let's not even talk about what a terrible blogger I've been of late. Darn... we're talking about it, aren't we? Anyway, let's just say that crafting hasn't been a huge focus for me of late. It's not that I don't have anything to write about, but my interests have wandered. I've been travelling a ton, riding around on my e-bike instead of riding the TTC (which minimizes my knitting time), and working on getting healthy (you can see my fitness blog here if you're interested). Anyway, I missed this blog, so I'm going to attempt to be better at keeping it up to date.

I'll begin by talking about something else I had put off for a long while: the fourth item I was to make for my Pay-It-Forward exchange. This hand-made gift was to go to Tas, who was the only person on my list who I hadn't met in real life. I really wanted to do a good job on this one since I was going to be sending it to a far-off land, which might have been why it took a while.

What I ended up making was a bag which used the Doors of Durin chart created by Andrea Krüß-Anders. This was actually the second attempt. For the first one, I used Cascade 220, a worsted weight yarn, and the charted piece turned out HUGE! I started over using Knit Picks Palette (left over from my Diatom shawl) and 2.25mm needles.

I used a simple [knit foreground colour, knit background colour] pattern for the backside of the bag so that I could knit it in the round (starting with a figure-eight cast-on). I did an applied i-cord edging which turned into the i-cord shoulder strap. I then did a couple of rounds of single-crochet around the bag opening for sturdiness. The part that took me the longest (for procrastination reasons) was just sewing in the zipper and lining.

I'm actually quite proud of how that turned out. The zipper was the only part I had to buy special, and putting it in was tricky, though not too hard. The lining fabric is actually from the packaging of some fancy headphones a friend who was staying with us bought. I thought it was too nice to throw away and figured it'd come in handy someday. And it did! I might use a different sewing stitch in the future to sew it to the zipper, but I think it still turned out ok.

Curiously enough, I think I'm starting to like colour work... I've avoided it in favour of more textured stitch patterns like cables and lace, but I could see myself doing more in the future. Anyway, I sent this off a little while ago and Tas really liked it! And that's all that really matters!