Making a Bag (or lots of them)
August 29, 2009 at 6:34 pm | In General | 1 CommentSorry for being so quiet, I’ve been busy and just returned from this year’s trip to the UK, in what seems to become an annual event for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll go next year, too, but that’s for another post.
My first stop this year was in Birmingham, for two days of fun at the Festival of Quilts. And yes, it’s big enough that you really need two days if you want to see everything at leisure. I enjoyed the exhibitions and the shopping, and we’ll get to pics of the shopping later, but what intrigued me right away was a stall that didn’t have anything to sell, just things to give away.
morsbags sociable guerilla bagging is an initiative to recycle fabric that isn’t used anymore into shopping bags and give them away to in front of supermarkets so people don’t have to get plastic bags that will just further clog up the environment. The idea is to get together with friends to make loads of bags and have fun while doing it, and then give them away. They had set a table with a few sewing machines at the festival and invited people to choose some of the recycled fabric they had there and make their own bag. So of course I had to play! Here’s the result:
The fabric is a nice heavy upholstery fabric, making a really sturdy shopping bag which I’ll definitely use. The intent of this initiative has some parallels to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef stuff I saw last year in London, but with a rather more practical bent to it.
Every plastic bag that isn’t needed is a good thing, but eliminating them isn’t easy at all. I’ve been trying to acquire as few of them as possible for quite a few years now, and it is difficult. There are so many shops that’ll pack your stuff into a plastic bag before you can stop them, and in some cases (say, clothing) they are practical to keep your new clothes (or wool, or yarn, or fabric) from becoming soiled while carrying them home. There are no easy solutions out there, but I still think every little bit helps, and I wouldn’t mind getting together with friends, make a few more of those bags and give them away.
Finding the Right Tool for the Job
August 2, 2009 at 1:43 pm | In Knitting | Leave a CommentRemember this?
Yes, my Maltese Shawl from Victorian Lace Today is growing, albeit slowly. I really enjoy knitting the pattern, but finding the right needles to help me with that turned out to be an adventure. The first try was using my trusty Addi Click needles. While there’s usually no problem using the interchangeable needle tips from Addi, the joins are definitely not smooth, and working with this lace-weight yarn was simply impossible, since it kept snagging at the joins all the time. So after a couple of rows I switched to a fixed Addi needle of the same size (at the top):
They’re nice, shiny, the yarn moves smoothly over the needle, but for this kind of lacework, the tips aren’t pointy enough. This pattern has lace stitches in every row, so you end up having to purl stitches together when one of the stitches is a yarn over. Trying to do that with blunt needles leads to lots of cursing and severe lack of motivation.
So, I needed another option. My LYS just got some Addi Lace needles (middle of picture) that are ostensibly designed for this kind of knitting, so I got myself one of those. The tips are nice and pointy, so the lace stitches immediately became much easier to work. But, the gold-coloured coating of those needles tarnishes really fast (there’s almost no reflection of the flash on the photo, and I haven’t knit more than maybe 10cm of the shawl with it), and when that happens, the stitches stop to slide easily on the needles. I had to work all the time to get the stitches to move to where I needed them. No wonder I started to ignore the project in favour of others.
I needed another option. I had heard the KnitPro (KnitPicks for any Americans) needles (bottom of picture) have good tips and a smooth surface, so I decided to give those a try. This is another system with exchangeable tips, but the joins are constructed differently so they’re smooth. And they’re pretty, too. You can see the tip geometry is almost identical to the Addi Lace needle. I tried them out, and yay, the fourth needle I tried for this project finally does the trick!
This was a really good lesson to remind me that using the appropriate tool for a job can make all the difference between fun and tedium. If something obviously doesn’t work, try something else! This is a good thing to keep in mind for hardware tools of all kinds as well as software. If something seems to be more difficult than it should be, check if you’re using the optimal tool for the job!
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