A Quickie Project

After the semi-success of the knitted-roving-then-fulled bag I decided to try my hand at another fulled bag made from unspun roving. This is the perfect project for roving that had already started fulling when I dyed it - still usable for spinning, but not without a lot of prep work.
This time I started with a garter-stitched rectangle for a flat bottom, then picked up stitches all around to knit up the sides. I decreased a little on the way up. I didn't have enough of the original roving, so I added some dark purple, also slightly fulled, roving in a wide stripe and as the rim of the openning. To get the right thickness for knitting, I split each length of roving, being careful to not draft it out at all since I didn't want weak spots. I used slightly thicker roving peices for the rim around the opening to give it a nice rounded effect. The strap is 2-stitch I-cord. It only took a couple of evenings, and I was feeling pretty smug when it went into the wash. Then I took it out. :-( The purple accents in the multi-colored roving had washed out to a dirty pink, no longer matching the purple roving. Sigh. I stretched the wet bag over a Christmas cookie tin to dry (I knew there was a reason to procrastinate putting those tins away). Here it is finished. After a couple of days I have concluded that it is not the ugliest bag ever, just kinda unattractive.
Lessons to be learned: 1. A quickie project results in a quickie product. 2. Just because two dye jobs look the same color, it does not mean they will stay that way when washed. 3. More pre-planning will result in a bag big enough to actually be useful. And 4. Regardless of how advisable it is to balance the load, NEVER felt your bag in a washer load with a white terry-cloth towel, unless you want to perform a chimpanzee grooming ritual of picking little white bits out of the felt.