Make do and mend

In the event my epic train journey this afternoon went remarkably smoothly and was extremely pleasant with minute-perfect connections and bizarrely quiet trains and buses all the way to Banbury.

I finished the all-in-one portion of the knitting on the Katharine vest somewhere between Wolverhampton and Leamington Spa and had finished the left front by the time the bus pulled up at Oxford station.



It's looking a tad on the small size (as in child-size) but I am keeping faith with the pattern and hoping that aggressive blocking will bump it up to the correct proportions.

I've spotted (I think) one further erratum in the pattern concerning the stitch count after the armhole decreases for the back which I don't think was reported on Ravelry so I'll have to check that out later.

I've recently been using my trusty knitting bag (a Christmas pressie two years ago) as a holder for my current project (rather than as a receptable for an assortment of odd needles and half balls of yarn) and have realised that it really is time that it had a new lining. Not least because the torn plastic of the old one had a very irritating habit of scratching the backs of my hands every time I tried to reach something out of it.

BEFORE:



Yeugh!

AFTER:



Yum!

The main lining fabric is some strong polycotton that I used to make muslins for skirts in the summer. The strip of edging at the top is the snail and peapod fabric bought over a year ago at the Festival of Quilts for Laurie's crib quilt. It's both functional and decorative as I only realised after cutting, sewing, and hemming all the main lining pieces that the sides of the bag were about an inch taller than the ends and so had to improvise something to make the sides a bit bigger - oops!

I made up the lining in its entirety on the sewing machine and then hand stitched it in place to the binding, hems, and zip (anywhere where a stitch could get purchase) of the outer bag.

The added bonus, aside from now having a lovely soft bag lining in which I won't keep losing needles and notions, is that I was able to lose the old electronic security tag which kept setting off the door alarms in Borders and Boots whenever I took it in there.