I’ve been having problems! I’ve been knitting bags using the magic loop method which I then felt. The bag is knitted in one piece, with the base being a a kind of rectangular shape with curved short ends. Normally the strap normally extends immediately above the short ends.
I’ve made this bag on numerous occasions with Rowan magpie wool, but now I’ve changed to a thinner wool (its 200m per 100g). I have changed the size of the knitting needles accordingly. The bag looks normal until I felt it, but then the two strap ends seem to move around the rim so they are no longer above the two short ends.
Has anyone any ideas why this is happening and what I can do about it, please? I presume it’s something to do with the way the stitches are tightening during the felting, but I never had this problem before. It’s really annoying cos the bags take ages to knit and I bought a fortunes worth of this wool, with plans to make lots of bag gifts for my family.
I had a felted bag pattern that did that…but it had nothing to do with the felting. What happened was when I picked up the stitches to start the bag after finishing the bottom, I put my marker for the start of the round at the wrong side of the bottom of the bag…so when I did the decreases for the handle, I was doing them over to the side of the bag, instead of along the ends.
When I moved the marker back 15 stitches to the other side of the bottom of the bag, all was well!
Don’t know if that’s your issue, but I found it makes a big difference where you start your round!
Thanks Lisa, though I don’t think that’s the problem as I checked the positioning of the handles on my last bag prior to felting it.
Also, I don’t actually pick up stitches from the base of the bag, as to make the base I increase stitches from my initial cast on, then just knit up the sides (the base is basically split in the middle parallel with the long side, with 1/4 the stitches for each short side at the beginning and end of each needle (not sure I explained that very well!). I then just take equal number of stitches from each end of each needle to make the handle (one at each short side), so it should always be centred on the middle of the short ends.
I figured it would be more complicated to have a separate base, and my method has always seemed to work until I changed wools!
Thank you anyway, I appreciate your comments, and I’ll certainly remember that next time i make a bag with a separate base.
