Felted bag

#1

Hi everyone,

After finding a beautiful 100% wool yarn, I knitting a bag which was meant to be felted (The balloon bag pattern). It looked really nice BEFORE felting, but after felting, I think that the yarn lost some of it’s color… and it just doesn’t look so nice, I think it didn’t felt all the way through evenly, and now I have parts that were felted, and parts that were not fully felted, and this is after like 5 cycles of the machine, with 3 now-very-clean pairs of jeans…

The bag also came out very very stiff… Will it remain like that ,or will it get better once dried? Maybe it’s because I didn’t knit the thing loosely enough?

oohh… the despair…

#2

Can you tell us the name of the yarn and the pattern name you used?

Did you knit it according to the pattern?

#3

The pattern is http://www.gogetyoursmock.org/TheBalloonBagWeb.pdf

I can’t provide the name of the yarn… it was very difficult to find a 100% wool yarn, and when I finally had my hands on a nice one, it had no labeling on it… But I don’t think it was the yarn’s fault…

#4

My first thought was that you used different yarns & they shrunk at different rates. Then I opened the picture & saw it was all one yarn.

Even though you washed it 3 times, wool can felt irregularly if it isn’t wet enough. You can try refelting it in the sink. Use hot soapy water & left it sit in the sink for 45 minutes to get fully saturated. Then agitate it to felt. The parts that have already shrunk to their max will probably stay the same. The other parts will shrink more. It will make the bag stiffer.

If that isn’t what you want, you can relax the felted sections slightly. This is trickier & doesn’t always work. It is the technique for fixing wool sweaters that have been shrunk by mistake. Put 2 cups of white vinegar in a sink full of lukewarm tapwater. Put in the felted item. Leave it sit for at least an hour. Then stretch out the sections that are too dense. If you hear any crunching sounds then it needs to soak more. Then rinse in lukewarm water, roll in towel & shape or lay flat to dry.

#5

Very interesting info Abby. May need it sometime. I made two felted purses with Patons Classic Wool Merino (my first and only attempts at felting.) I was told I couldn’t use a top loading machine at the laundromat because I couldn’t open it to check on the item. I’ve always liked finding things out the hard way in life and did it anyway. I put the purse in a zippered pillowcase and washed in a regular hot cycle with jeans. Both came out fully felted and looked great. One was in brown tweed. I was told it wouldn’t show the tweed but it did. I gave the other one (black) to a friend who carried it to a wine tasting and got so many compliments she said I should sell them. Possibly the washer was too full for this purse and that’s why it didn’t fully felt??