How to Grow a Felted Bag

A post in which I use the premis of finishing my felted bag to give way too much information.



When I was stymied, on Thanksgiving Day, in my pursuit of a finished product, known in knitting blogland as an FO (I think!), I knit and finished and felted lots 'o flowers. (The 'O is in honor of the summers we spent at Land 'O Lakes, Wisconsin, in a cabin on a lake, when my daughters were little. My husband suggested, one year, that it would be a good idea to send a truckload of the letter F up north, so that all the letter O apostrophes could become OF's.)




This is what I kinddly refer to as my freakishly small hand, showing how the handle will look with the bag. (Freakishly small in that when I place my hand, palm to palm, with a much younger person, say a daughter at 8 years old, my hand is SMALLER. And the health screening folks say that if, when you wrap your index finger and thumb around your wrist, that you have A) a small frame if they overlap B) a large frame if they don't meet or C) a medium frame if they just touch. Mine just brush, but again, the palm and fingers are so short and I myself am only 5'2 1/2 or so, so my explanation is that I have a small frame and too small hands to measure.)

The real goal of this post, though so buried that any sane knitter will have clicked on to another blog by now, is to ask: advice on attaching the handles?

The NoniBag website suggests sewing them on with button thread, or threading a piece of fabric thru the small openings at the base and sewing those tabs to the bag. But I'm not sure that sewing thread will support the weight of the bag plus contents (and I'm a heavy packer).
Any experience to contribute with using a grommet tool? Or machine sewing or having the friendly shoe repairperson sew the tabs on?



Finally, a virtual field of felted flowers.

Try saying that five times, alternating with the phrase "freakishly small fingers." Winner gets a prize!

Comments

FairyGodKnitter said…
I would go with the machine sewing or the shoe repair shop and cover the stitching with the flowers. Which flowers have you chosen? I read in someone's blog that the easy way to felt small items like flowers is to use a stand mixer with a metal bowl, fill it with hot water and use the beaters to aggitate and felt. That sure beats diving into the washer every few minutes doesn't it?
Janet said…
How can knitters be so creative? There's a definite quirkiness to this, though, sort of like using your dishwasher to dye yarn (a suggestion made at a workshop or class I attended). I like the washing machine, but I put the little stuff in a net lingerie bag so I can keep fishing it out without too much trouble.