purse – We Are Makers

Cage Match, Concluded

September 1, 2017September 1, 2017 by Makers' Mercantile, posted in Franklin Habit, Uncategorized

For an introduction to what goes on in this column, click here.

For the first part of this adventure, click here.

I almost feel as though this week I should begin with an apology for the lack of drama in what follows.

I try to give you a good read, truly I do, with laughs and thrills and the occasional car chase; but you can’t, as my grandmother famously said while on a date with Mick Jagger, always get what you want.

To get the Makers’ Mercantile cage purse across the finish line, I had two things left to do:

Attach the woven lining to the knitted liner.
Attach the liner to the leather cage.

There are knitters who steer clear of making purses and bags on principle, just to avoid woven linings. This is a great pity. A knit or crochet bag with a woven lining will be stronger and more durable, less inclined to droop and pull out of shape, and less liable to catch and snag everything you put into it.

And sewing is not (or at least, need not be) the trauma some think it is. A simple bag lining is about as simple as sewing gets. More about that in a minute.

Make It Snappy

Now, the “official” pattern that comes with cage purse kits is available as a free download from Makers’ Mercantile. I used it as my guide for designing a lining of my own, and as usual I decided to make some adjustments. I don’t think I’ve ever followed anyone’s pattern exactly as written.

I decided to install the snaps, which are included with the cage,

before sewing in the lining, whereas the pattern suggests you do the reverse. On your purse, you choose.

If you’ve never put in a snap before, rest assured these are a breeze. Since my bag was quite freeform at the top, I put it into the cage to see exactly where the male* halves of my snaps (pictured above) needed to be in order to line up with the female* halves of the snaps on the cage (which come already installed). I marked these spots on the liner with locking ring stitch markers.

Then you make a little sandwich with each snap, one by one, like this…

…with the post on the back of the snap stuck right through the knitted fabric.

Then you place the cylinder tool…

over the nubbin on the front of the snap, and tap the cylinder with a hammer. I do mean tap. Brute force is not required. It took me two modest taps to get each snap set firmly. Boom.

fwf-50-snapset — I’ve never felt more butch.

The knitted portion of my liner being thus completed, it was time to add the woven lining.

Line It Up

The official pattern for the cage purse gives full instructions for this part of the project, so I’ll confine myself to a few notes about linings generally.

First. Use the best woven (as opposed to commercial knit/jersey) fabric you can afford. It need not be expensive; but if you have the choice, buy from a reputable retailer who carries reputable lines.

If you buy in person, give the fabric a good fondle and a few firm tugs. If it looks flimsy and feels sleazy, if the printing is muddy, if it seems inclined stretch out of shape easily, if you can read a comic book through it, it probably won’t stand up well to the demands placed on a handbag. It may, in fact, fall apart as you sew with it. Fabrics whose standard retail prices are super cheap are usually super cheap for good reason.

I went with a print from Cotton + Steel called “Cat Lady,” …

…because in my social circle, it’s inevitable that whoever gets this purse is going to stuff it with balls of yarn. She will probably also have at least one cat.

fwf-50-fabricshot — Note: The lighting in this shot tipped the blue quite a bit. It’s really far closer to the navy in the previous photograph.

Second. Don’t skimp on the preparatory steps.

Sewing has a different flow than either knitting or crochet. Both knitting and crochet consist, in the main, of knitting and crocheting. Other stuff–seaming, blocking, weaving in–comes in at the end. We front-load the fun. Sewing insists that you begin with planning, measuring, cutting, pinning. It takes time to get to the sewing part of sewing.

This feels ~~ass-backwards~~ somewhat odd to those of us who knit and crochet.

Listen. If you hate the preliminary steps, that’s okay. Acknowledge that. Embrace that. Then take a breath and do them anyway. It may help to have a good friend supervise you.

fwf-50-supervisor — “After you weave in all those ends and take your measurements, you may have a cookie.”

Since my liner pattern was something I cooked up myself, I measured the end product to be certain it would accommodate the lining described in the official pattern. Turns out my liner was a smidge taller and a smidge narrower. I adjusted my cut pieces accordingly.

fwf-tape-measure — Measure twice, cut once. Maybe measure three times.

Third. Don’t let unfamiliar techniques frighten you.

When I teach Introduction to Hand Sewing, we end our class project with slip stitch–the same stitch that joins the woven lining to the knitting liner. Students often approach slip stitch with trepidation because it looks like a magic trick. You sew and sew, and when you’re finished you can’t see the sewing. You just have two fabrics that are now joined, invisibly.

Cool, right?

And you can do it. Yes, you can. Most of what used to be called plain sewing–the toolkit of handmade stitches necessary to turn out everyday items–was taught as a matter of course to little girls for centuries.

Are you going to let some little Dickensian imp in a dirty pinafore sew circles around you?

Heck no.

Here is all there is behind the “magic” of slip stitch.

After the lining pieces have been sewn together, turn and press the lining fabric to the wrong side as directed in the pattern.

fwf-lining-prepped — *Kindly note my new, adorable fire engine red Bohin embroidery scissors in background.*

Place the liner inside the lining…

…and secure it with a generous number of straight pins so that you can focus on your stitching.

Step One.

Thread your sewing needle with a coordinating thread, and tie a stout knot at the end.

Bring the needle up through the fabric at point A, which you will notice is right on the fold of the lining. (Alternatively, especially if the ghost of my late grandmother is watching you, instead of using a knot you may secure the beginning with a series of tiny stitches at point A. This is called a “tack.”)

Step Two.

Take a small stitch in the liner (knitted) fabric at Point B (directly above Point A, near the top edge of the woven lining). Note: My stitches into the liner all went around–rather than through–strands of yarn, as this felt more secure than splitting strands with the sewing needle.

Step Three.

Take a horizontal stitch into the fold+ of the woven lining by putting the needle in at Point C and out at Point D.

Step Four.

Take a horizontal stitch into the knitted liner from Point E to Point F, near to and parallel to the top edge of the woven lining.

Repeat Steps Three and Four all the way around the liner. Every few stitches, gently pull the thread to even out the tension of the sewing stitches. You want the lining to lie smooth against the liner– don’t pull so hard that puckers begin to form. When the seam is complete, fasten off with a discreet, small tack in the woven lining.

That’s it.

+Some say just behind the fold. Your choice. In sewing, as in knitting and crochet, there are many paths to the same destination.

In the Bag

What else can I say? I’m really pleased with it. I wanted the sinuous lines of the short rows to wiggle and play against the straight edges of the cage, and they do.

It could be about an inch bigger all around at the base, to really fill up the cage; but that’s about all I’d change.

What’s more: as the liner is held to the cage with snaps, it can be removed and replaced with any number of other linings whenever inspiration strikes or your mood changes.

It didn’t even take long to knit–comparable to a hat. I’m already thinking of other liners–crocheted, embroidered, woven. And other yarns, too. These were all left over from previous Fridays with Franklin projects, but they could have been:

assorted lengths of handspun…

souvenir yarns collected on a memorable trip…

the leftover yarn from a favorite sweater for a matching sweater/purse combo

bits of yarn (and blobs of knitting) contributed by a members of a group to make a special farewell or birthday gift…

And the yarns you put into a cage liner are right there, with you, visible and useful. A souvenir afghan is lovely, but it usually has to stay at home. Not to mention that the usual everybody-knit-a-square afghan requires a lot of work and a mountain of yarn. A souvenir/commemorative cage purse is well within the grasp of knitters or knitting groups who are short on cash, pressed for time, or just plain lazy.

Coming Up

The next Fridays with Franklin will be the first in which I get to use a vise and power tools. That’s all I’m telling you right now. Nope, sorry. My lips are buttoned.

*I’m not trying to be cute. That’s what they’re called.

Tools and Materials Appearing in This Issue

Makers’ Mercantile Leather Cage Purse available separately or as a kit
Bohin Embroidery Scissors (shown in Red, available in six colors)
Makers’ Mercantile Tape Measure (shown in Orange, available in seven colors)
HiKoo Simpliworsted (55% Merino Wool, 25% Acrylic, 17% Nylon. 140 yards per 100 gram hank)
HiKoo Rylie (50% Baby Alpaca, 25% Mulberry Silk, 25% Linen. 274 yards per 50 gram hank)
HiKoo Kenzie (50% New Zealand Merino Wool, 25% Nylon, 10% Angora, 10% Alpaca, 5% Silk Noils. 160 yards per 50 gram ball)
HiKoo Kenzington (60% New Zealand Merino, 25% Nylon, 10% Alpaca, 5% Silk Noils. 208 yards per 100 gram hank)
Schoppel-Wolle Leinen Los (70% Wool, 30% Linen. 328 yards per 100 gram ball)

About Franklin

Designer, teacher, author and illustrator Franklin Habit is the author of It Itches: A Stash of Knitting Cartoons (Interweave Press, 2008). His new book, I Dream of Yarn: A Knit and Crochet Coloring Book was brought out by Soho Publishing in May 2016 and is in its second printing.

He travels constantly to teach knitters at shops and guilds across the country and internationally; and has been a popular member of the faculties of such festivals as Vogue Knitting Live!, STITCHES Events, the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, Squam Arts Workshops, the Taos Wool Festival, Sock Summit, and the Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat.

Franklin’s varied experience in the fiber world includes contributions of writing and design to Vogue Knitting, Yarn Market News, Interweave Knits, Interweave Crochet, PieceWork, Twist Collective; and a regular columns and cartoons for Mason-Dixon Knitting, PLY Magazine, Lion Brand Yarns, and Skacel Collection/Makers’ Mercantile. Many of his independently published designs are available via Ravelry.com.

He is the longtime proprietor of The Panopticon, one of the most popular knitting blogs on the Internet (presently on hiatus).

Franklin lives in Chicago, Illinois, cohabiting shamelessly with 15,000 books, a Schacht spinning wheel, four looms, and a colony of yarn that multiplies whenever his back is turned.

Follow Franklin online via Twitter (@franklinhabit), Instagram (@franklin.habit), his Web site (franklinhabit.com) or his Facebook page.

Cage Match, Part Three

August 11, 2017August 11, 2017 by Makers' Mercantile, posted in Franklin Habit

For an introduction to what goes on in this column, click here.

For the first part of this adventure, click here.

I was at a gathering once with a knitter who held up her shawl-in-progress and squealed, “This has been so much fun to knit! I’m actually slowing down because I don’t want it to end!”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

I am often sick to death of even a fun project weeks…months…years…before I bind off. This is nothing to boast of, and explains the shameful state of the dimmest corner of my workroom. There lie projects that it would be wrong to describe as “hibernating,” unless you would agree that the buried and fossilized remains of cretaceous reptiles are just having a nap down there.

You may therefore imagine my astonishment when the “leftovers” lining for the Makers’ Mercantile cage purse…

…was so much fun to work on that I had to force myself to stop and bind off.

There were no great departures from the plan I tested in the miniature version. I knit the oval(ish) bottom in HiKoo Simpliworsted 952 (Peacock Tonal), beginning at the center with Judy’s Magic Cast On…

fwf-49-ovalbottom — *Please take a moment to admire my handsome bottom. Thank you.*

…and was even more pleased with the results this time, since I used stitch markers right from the start and therefore didn’t misplace my increases quite so often.

When the bottom was big enough, I took stock of how many live stitches I had (answer: 108). This divides obligingly into four, which settled the question of how many stitches I’d use as the basis for each short-rowed blob of color (answer: 27). Since the bag would have no further shaping, it would always take me about four blobs* to go around once.

Given that I’d be using four different yarn bases in eight different colorways, I felt sure I could use a consistent base number without the blobs looking too much alike. I really wanted to avoid uniformity, to give this bag an organic feel, like layers of sediment** that had built up naturally atop one another.

Here is the recipe for a blob:

Row 1 (RS): Join the new color, knit 27 stitches. Wrap and turn a stitch in the adjacent blob (see part two).

Row 2 (WS): Knit all stitches in the new color. Wrap and turn a stitch in the adjacent blob.

Row 3 (RS): Knit to penultimate stitch of blob (1 stitch less than previous row). Wrap and turn.

Row 4 (WS): As Row 3.

Repeat Rows 3 and 4 until blob reaches desired blobbiness, ending with a WS row. Break working yarn, leaving a tail of 5-6 inches to weave in later.

Turn work. Slip the live stitches of the just-completed blob from left needle to right needle as if to purl until your right needle tip is wherever you’d like the next blob to begin. Begin again from Row 1 for next blob.

For added verve, vary the length and/or starting point of some blobs by a stitch or two. Pretty much anything you do is going to look interesting and quite possibly beautiful.

Tiny tip: when joining in each new color, leave the tail hanging on the right side of the fabric like this:

fwf-49-tails — *When you join a new yarn, let the tail hang on the right side of the work.*

As you work, the tail gets pinched between the stitches on either side; and your first stitch won’t pull loose quite so readily as when you leave the tail hanging on the wrong side. (When it’s time to weave in ends, just bring the tail through to the wrong side and proceed as usual.)

From blob to blob, as the yarns changed so did the gauge. Blobs knit in HiKoo Kenzington and HiKoo Simpliworsted were quite firm…

fwf-49-kenzandsimpli — *HiKoo Kenzington above, HiKoo Simpliworsted below.*

…whereas HiKoo Rylie was so fine in comparison to Kenzington and the various forms of Simpliworsted that I decided to knit it with a strand of each colorway (086 Periwinkle and 087 Freesia) held double.

I was thrilled with the blend.

Good blobs, on the whole; but as they all came from the bright-blue-into-purple camp I was afraid the bag might tip over into something too sweetly candy-colored for my taste.

That’s where the Schoppel-Wolle Leinen Los…

came in.

I decided to run a occasional stripe of this through the fabric to break things up. Since the two colors of Rylie had worked so well together, I decided to try a strand each of colorways 980 and 7653 together….

…and you could see it from fifteen feet away. It screamed. So I ripped back and tried again with two strands of 7653 together.

Better. Rather than short-rowed blobs, these occasional bits of Leinen Los were short-rowed stripes. In other words, work all the way from the first stitch of the round to the last, wrap and turn, and knit back in the other direction. I could have knit a round and then purled a round–but I was having so much fun with the short rows I didn’t want to stop.

In fact, my enthusiasm never flagged. When at length it struck me that I ought to take a measurement and see if I’d made the bag tall enough, I was an inch over the target.

You know what? I really like it.

Once the ends have been woven in, I’ll give it a wet block to settle it into to its final proportions.

Then, the final step before it goes into the cage: a woven fabric lining. I love a woven lining in a knit or crocheted bag. I plan to plunder with pleasure the Makers’ Mercantile lines of lovely cotton prints. Did you know Makers’ Mercantile carries deluxe cotton prints, among other fabrics and trims?

Oh, but they do. They do! Cotton + Steel, Liberty of London, Seven Islands…

See you in two weeks.

*I hope this isn’t getting too technical for you.
**Yeah, the sedimentary layers in this case are mainly purple. But still.

Tools and Materials Appearing in This Issue

Makers’ Mercantile Leather Cage Purse available separately or as a kit
addi® Olive Wood Circular Needle available in fixed and interchangeable varieties
Schacht Cricket 15-inch Rigid Heddle Loom
HiKoo Simpliworsted (55% Merino Wool, 25% Acrylic, 17% Nylon. 140 yards per 100 gram hank)
HiKoo Rylie (50% Baby Alpaca, 25% Mulberry Silk, 25% Linen. 274 yards per 50 gram hank)
HiKoo Kenzie (50% New Zealand Merino Wool, 25% Nylon, 10% Angora, 10% Alpaca, 5% Silk Noils. 160 yards per 50 gram ball)
HiKoo Kenzington (60% New Zealand Merino, 25% Nylon, 10% Alpaca, 5% Silk Noils. 208 yards per 100 gram hank)
Schoppel-Wolle Leinen Los (70% Wool, 30% Linen. 328 yards per 100 gram ball)

About Franklin

He is the longtime proprietor of The Panopticon, one of the most popular knitting blogs on the Internet (presently on hiatus).

Franklin lives in Chicago, Illinois, cohabiting shamelessly with 15,000 books, a Schacht spinning wheel, four looms, and a colony of yarn that multiplies whenever his back is turned.

Follow Franklin online via Twitter (@franklinhabit), Instagram (@franklin.habit), his Web site (franklinhabit.com) or his Facebook page.

Cage Match, Part Two

July 28, 2017August 11, 2017 by Makers' Mercantile, posted in Franklin Habit

For an introduction to what goes on in this column, click here.

For the first part of this adventure, click here.

Before I sat down to do up today’s column, I flipped back to Part One and found I’d written this about insert for my Makers’ Mercantile Cage Purse:

“I felt this piece ought to be as simple as possible.”

And I’d written this:

“This piece will be nothing but garter stripes.”

Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Nice Bottom

After I’d posted Options 1 and 2…

…of course Options 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 presented themselves at the darnedest moments. Walking Rosamund, waiting for the subway, showering, listening to upstairs neighbor’s kid practice her tap dancing at 4 a.m.

The more I turned over the ideas, the more I felt I’d like work the liner all in one piece. What about a bottom worked circularly? Could I do that?

It seemed to me I could.

This was my sketch.

The cast on you see referenced there is, of course, Judy’s Magic Cast on by the (let us now praise famous knitters) Judy Becker. She describes how to do better than I ever could, here at Knitty.com.

Judy invented it as a gorgeous and fuss-free beginning for toe-up socks, but I’ve never used it for toe-up socks. I’ve used it countless times, though, as either the circular beginning of a piece I want to grow outwards from the center; or whenever I want a cast on to work first in one direction (from the bottom row of stitches), and then in the other (from the top row).

So I cast on, magically, with HiKoo Simpliworsted in 952 Peacock Tonal and begin to knit. You can imagine my delight when it worked.

(You may have noticed that the swatch, when it would no longer lie flat on one circular needle, got moved to two circular needles. A very slick designer would have put it on two identical addi® Olive Wood circulars so it would look pretty for the photograph. I, on the other hand, often make design decisions based on what’s closest to the couch. And this is a column about the realities of creativity. So here it is on one olive needle and one needle (of the same size, at least) from my set of addi® Click Interchangeables. Sue me.)

The above is what I think of as a proof-of-concept swatch–concrete evidence that the basic idea has merit. Even though I messed up the placement of my increases now and again (until I broke down and added the stitch markers), and even though I got an oval instead of a rectangle, the bottom is handsome and lies down as required.

I’m pretty sure I could move towards a rectangle by diddling the increase points, but I’m starting to groove on the idea of a curvy bag in a square cage.

Bonus: I don’t have to do a darn thing to get the sides going–just continue to work around on the live stitches, without further increases.

When I had swatched enough to convince myself this would be a suitable foundation, I decided to nail down a strategy for the sides.

Short Cut

Just garter stripes, right? That’s what I said. Just garter stripes.

Since these theoretical garter stripes would continue in the round, I’d have to purl every other row. I don’t mind purling. The bottom of the bag was purled on every other round.

But I’ve sometimes worked a “circular” piece of garter stitch with short rows. Usually I do it because my purl stitches and knit stitches are slightly different sizes. In some yarns, especially those with little stretch, that leads to “rowing out”–clearly visible differences in gauge from round to round. If I’m never purling, I’m never rowing out.

Short rows aren’t complicated. A short row is just a row you cease to knit before you reach the end. Instead, you turn the work and head back in the other direction. That’s all. Where you turn, you may form a gap in the fabric–but that, too is easily dealt with. More on that in a minute.

So, okay. I thought about using short rows in the bag to avoid rowing out. I hadn’t done it in multiple colors before. Feeling a little timid, I joined a new color to the bottom. Before I knew it, I was a bored with the idea of stripes.

I mean, stripes. Come on.

Even in all these different yarns and colors, stripes are just stripes.

What if I really pushed the short row idea, building up areas of each color before moving on to the next? Could I do something like this?

Only one way to find out.

Short ‘n’ Curvy

I decided to try this process for each new section of color/yarn.

1. On the right side, join in the new color (here, it’s HiKoo Simpliworsted in 033 Red Hat Purple) and knit some number of stitches. My first thought was to make it a pretty random number, since this a random jumble of leftover yarns I’m working with.

2. At the end of this first row, perform a wrap-and-turn to help prevent a gap at the turning point. A wrap and turn isn’t difficult. Just knit to the turning point, and slip the next (unworked) stitch from the left needle to the right needle as if to purl.

…then bring the working yarn between the needle tips to the near side of the work…

…then return the slipped stitch to the left needle….

Turn the work. Carry on knitting. Since we’re making garter stitch, the working yarn will already be where you need it to be, on what is now the far side of the work. That’s it. (Note: In most stockinette stitch short row techniques, there’s a maneuver for for picking up a wrap the next time you encounter it. In garter stitch, we don’t need to do that. Yay.)

3. Make each row one stitch shorter than the previous row. Wrap and turn at the end of every row. After you’ve done this for a little while, you’ll have built up a sweet little blob of color.

4. When you feel that the blob is just about the right size, or when you can’t get any shorter with your rows, finish a wrong side row and then knit part of the way across a right side row.

5. At this point, join in a new color for the next blob, on this same right side row. You’ll be back at Step 1.

Working in this fashion will gradually take you all the way around the live stitches at the edge of the bottom–and when you’re back to the beginning, just carry on with more short row blobs in different colors until the bag is as tall as it needs to be.

Such is my theory, anyhow. How did the swatch look?

After doing this with three different colors (and two different yarns) on my swatch…

…I decided to take the piece off the needles and see what I was getting.

I’m excited. I think the curvy top selvedge is something we might want to accentuate.

With a little more swatching to refine the details, I feel confident we’ll be on the way to a fun to knit (and fun to look at) liner for the purse.

So much for keeping it simple.

See you in two weeks…

Tools and Materials Appearing in This Issue

About Franklin

He is the longtime proprietor of The Panopticon, one of the most popular knitting blogs on the Internet (presently on hiatus).

Franklin lives in Chicago, Illinois, cohabiting shamelessly with 15,000 books, a Schacht spinning wheel, four looms, and a colony of yarn that multiplies whenever his back is turned.

Follow Franklin online via Twitter (@franklinhabit), Instagram (@franklin.habit), his Web site (franklinhabit.com) or his Facebook page.

Cage Match, Part One

July 14, 2017August 11, 2017 by Makers' Mercantile, posted in Franklin Habit, Uncategorized

It scarcely seems possible, but by the close of this series we will have reached the fiftieth installment of Fridays with Franklin. Fifty! Can you imagine?

I was flipping through my binder of shade cards from Makers’ Mercantile looking for the next yarn to play with when my elbow knocked over a little basket of yarn that was sitting on the work table. Odd balls of yarn spilled all over the floor. Or they would have, if they’d hit the floor. Instead they spilled all over the four open boxes on the floor that were already full of other odd balls of yarn. You couldn’t actually see the floor.

It appears that nearly fifty columns full of knitting, crochet, and weaving have landed me with quite the buffet of leftovers.

That’s not something to cry about, I know; but please keep in mind that I live in a large city and do my work in a very small room. How small? Not much larger than the footprint of a king-sized bed. It is crammed, absolutely crammed, with things I need. Here, I’ve drawn you a little plan:

Of course, what you don’t see in the plan are the things I have hanging from the walls and ceiling, including my Schacht Cricket Rigid Heddle Loom, my card weaving loom from John Mullarkey, my swift, my project bags full of things in progress, and other hanging bags full of weaving, spinning, and embroidery tools. Every inch is spoken for.

I try to keep leftover yarns organized and sorted into the bins under the bed in the next room. That’s the place where, by mutual agreement, my stash lives. If it won’t fit under the bed it has to leave the apartment. Fortunately, it’s a big bed. Good intentions don’t sort skeins, though; so I have a perpetual backlog on the workroom floor. The prettiest little tripping hazard you ever saw.

Seeing as we’re celebrating a milestone of sorts with this adventure, I think it’d be fun (and prudent) to hold back from ordering new stuff and make use of what’s already to hand.

Talk about memory lane.

There’s HiKoo Simpliworsted here from The Adventure on the Floor (the crocheted mat) and The Adventure of the Warm Puppy and The Adventure of the Transparent Excuse to Show You More Pictures of My Adorable Dog (sweaters for Rosamund).

There’s HiKoo Rylie from The Adventure of the Scarf That Ate the World (and the Into the Hoods interlude that followed).

There’s HiKoo Kenzie and also HiKoo Kenzington from The Adventure of the Stealth Blanket (the Ohio Star quilt-inspired afghan and pillow).

There’s Schoppel-Wolle Leinen Los from The Adventure of the Little Poser.

And that’s just the top layer.

These are wildly different yarns, in wildly different fiber blends, constructed in all manner of methods from chainette (Kenzington) to felted singles (Leinen Los).

Pushing the pile around didn’t give me fun ideas for using them all together. An obvious choice would have been some sort of scrap blanket, but one of the yarns (Leinen Los) isn’t really well suited to that. A scrappy shawl might be fun–but a shawl made with a significant quantity of hefty Kenzington might suffocate you.

Then I got a note from one of my friends at Makers’ Mercantile in which she mentioned one of their most popular kits–the Cage Purse. You may well have seen a friend with one of these, or you may well have one yourself.

The cage bit…

…comes ready to use. The fun is knitting (or crocheting) a liner for it. The open cage supports your work, which means you don’t have to resort to felting in order to get a bag that won’t droop and sag when you fill it. And because it’s a cage–well made from good leather and handsome, sturdy rivets…

…whatever sort of liner you create is beautifully shown off.

Makers’ Mercantile sells the cages as part of several kits (like this Brown Kit, or the Red Kit shown below) – each with yarn, pattern, and fabric for a lining…

…or you can buy just the cage (in a choice of colors such as Basil) and use your imagination. That’s what I decided to do.

The Amazon Arrows cowl in our last adventure…

…had so much going on (miters! shadow knitting! duplicate stitch! I-cord!) that I felt this piece ought to be as simple as possible. When you have four very different, eye-catching yarns in eight or ten colorways all smooshed together, I think it’s unwise to make the structure of the fabric complicated as well.

So, what’s the least complicated knit fabric? Probably garter stitch: when working flat, knit all stitches and all rows. I cast on for a small swatch…

…and within a few inches I got that tingle in my chest that either means I’m onto something I like, or that I shouldn’t eat half a pan of brownies right before bed. I hadn’t been eating brownies.

This is nothing but garter stripes with changes from yarn to yarn at will. Most of the colors are fairly closely related (clearly I have a thing for purples and blues), but as we noted the yarns themselves are strange bedfellows. And I like that. The fabric was looking good, and the swatch was (brace yourself) fun to knit. Truly fun.

When you find yourself smiling at a swatch, that’s a good sign.

I sketched out what I needed to make. Pretty simple, really.

All that remained before calculating my cast-on numbers was a plan for how to make that happen. There were two obvious options.

Option 1…

…was flat construction. Knit panels and sew them together. That would make sense, as garter stitch is a natural result of flat knitting. I don’t mind sewing–it’s quite fun, really, once you know a little bit about what you are doing–and the side seams would give the bag some structure.

On the other hand, a seam sewn in a fabric with this many yarns would never be invisible. Not a deal-breaker, but a point to consider. It also might be tricky to sew a good seam when joining panels where two very different yarns are meant to align at the selvedges. In fact, just getting all four sides to be exactly the same length might be a challenge.

Option 2…

…was primarily circular construction. Knit the bottom as a flat panel, then pick up and knit around the edges and work the body of the bag in the round. Without doing anything special at the corners, this bag would have softly contoured sides. It might be possible to give those corners a touch more definition using Elizabeth Zimmermann’s “phoney [sic] seams” technique–slipping the corner stitches every other round. There would be no sewing. But every other round, in order to make garter stitch, would have to be purled.

Either way, we’re talking about a ton of ends to weave in. Happily, I like weaving in ends.

So, what to do?

See you in two weeks!

Tools and Materials Appearing in This Issue

About Franklin

He is the longtime proprietor of The Panopticon, one of the most popular knitting blogs on the Internet (presently on hiatus).

Franklin lives in Chicago, Illinois, cohabiting shamelessly with 15,000 books, a Schacht spinning wheel, four looms, and a colony of yarn that multiplies whenever his back is turned.

Follow Franklin online via Twitter (@franklinhabit), Instagram (@franklin.habit), his Web site (franklinhabit.com) or his Facebook page.