Much Ado About Nothing Much

And I have the pictures to prove it...
Side A...


And Side B...



Interesting colour combination. My camera isn't capturing it perfectly, but it's a mod, eye-popping mix of orange and hot pink! I'm almost throught the increase rows, starting into the belly of the bag. I was thinking that after the fairly close attention I had to pay to the knitting to ensure that the stripe pattern was "set" correctly, I'd be able to pick up a bit of speed now. No. The bag's capacity is increased at that point through a series of short rows, so I'm probably trading one attention demanding task for another.

On the plus side, it is fascinating to watch the double sided, striped fabric form. I like this technique and the end result enough to consider using it again. Perhaps a less shapely bag or possibly a reversible scarf (nice and straight) would be fun. I have a teeny bit of Noro Kujaku that I haven't found a use for yet. It might be interesting to back it with a solid colour for a reversible knit bag. Wonder what happens if you try to felt double sided fabric? Hmmmm...

As a technical note, I'm knitting the Hobo Bag out of two colours of the same yarn. (Lana Gatto Atom, a suede-like yarn) This apparently does not ensure that each colour is identical in texture and the hot pink skein seems "thicker" than the orange. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, but when the two yarns have to balance each other out in the double fabric, I'm noticing that the orange strand just isn't hiding the back colour as well as the hot pink strand does. Well, as we used to call lessons learned in public auditing..."something for the notes for next year file".

Well, I can't blame all of the slow knitting progress on the complexity of the pattern, or witlessness of the knitter. The girls are home for their March Break this week and it was craft day (kids, not mums) followed by clean up day. My SIL/BIL/baby nephew are staying over tomorrow night and I like them enough to want them to have clean sheets and a kitchen free of glitter glue landmines.