Craft Cat Cottage: Felted Purse Finally Finished

I have been using the same leather purse for many years and it has slowly been disintegrating over the last few months. At first, I sewed up the places where the side seams came unsewn, but when the handle broke and the rest of the seams came apart AND I was carrying my purse around in a plastic shopping bag, I knew it was time to be replaced. So I gathered up some of my handspun yarn to choose which ones I wanted to use to knit up a felted purse.

I separated out some green, purple, brown and beige in my fattest yarn so the purse will be really sturdy. Then I knit a sample to see if I liked the combination of stripes together.

I ended up using the stripes on the blanket to compare the size of the sample before and after it was felted.

I gathered up a load of laundry and washed the sample to see how much it would felt.

It didn't shrink very much, so I gathered up more laundry and put it through another wash. As before, I used hot water for the wash cycle and cold water for the rinse cycle.

That was only slightly smaller. I didn't really have any more laundry to wash so I found some blankets that could use some freshening up before the cold weather set in and washed the sample swatch with those. Then I put the whole load in the hot dryer. That did the trick. I also trimmed off the extra llama guard hairs on the lowest stripe. They were a bit prickly.

I noticed that the cast-on shrunk more than the rest of the rows, so I used a different cast-on when I knit the purse. I knit a rectangle for the bottom section and then picked up stitches from the edges of the other three sides and continued knitting in the round until the purse was as tall as I wanted, allowing for shrinkage.

Here it is before washing, being compared with the felted sample. I also knit some handles and felted those along with the bag.

I didn't have enough dirty laundry to felt it in three separate loads, so I put a load of my son's clothes in to wash (he usually does his own) and set it on the hottest setting. I soaked the bag and handles in cold water with a little dish detergent added before throwing them into the hot washer. After about five minutes, I took the bag and handles out and soaked them in cold water. Then I reset the washer to the beginning of the cycle and put the bag and handles back in. I repeated this a few times until I could see a significant amount of felting. After letting the washer finish all of it's cycles, I threw it all into the dryer. I was glad it felted enough in just one load.

Next, I sewed a lining and pockets (LOTS of pockets), including one pocket made from the felted sample swatch. I hate to waste all of the effort and yarn that went in to making the sample.

You can't see it in the pictures, but inside each of the big pockets, there are more pockets. Now I'm really organised!

Unfortunately, one of the handles disappeared. I searched through all of the clothes in the dryer a few times, but I couldn't find it. So I bought a set of handles from JoAnne's. (It was only $4, using my discount coupon.) A week later my son found the felted handle. It looked something like a snake and had somehow crawled into one of his pants pockets in the dryer. Good thing it didn't look like a spider. He's really afraid of those. Here is the bag after it was finished. It's a lot heavier than my leather purse was, but I like it.