Chicago Bag: November 2003 Archives

It might not have looked like much, but one of the things I was happiest to see in my last package from ThreadBear was a skein of Cascade 220 that matched the nice charcoal color I had started my Chicago bag in. You might recall that I grossly underestimated my yarn requirements because I forgot some rules of basic geometry. I should have been paying better attention when the teacher told me I might need this stuff someday.

Like all felted stuff, it doesn't look like too much yet. But now I've completed the entire bag part and the shaping is a little clearer. For those of you who aren't familiar which Chicago or Chicagoans, we like to orient ourselves with landmarks. We drive towards the Lake, we live near Wrigley Field, or in my case, not too far from the United Center. So I'm taking you on a little trip around my bag from a Chicago perspective. Fasten your seatbelt... sometimes I drive a little fast.

Chicago from the Lake

Here's the front of the bag. There's a lot of beautiful things on the Chicago lake shore -- many, such as Buckingham Fountain, were meant to be viewed from Lake Michigan. Believe it or not, some of the city planners of long ago believed that Lake Michigan would be one of the major access points for the city. So this is the view of the bag from the Lake side. It will be clearer when felted, but the front and back of the back are roughly hemicircular (or as hemicircular as a knitted piece can easily get).

If we take a little trip up Lake Shore Drive (did you know that, technically, it is illegal to drive any vehicle registered as a truck on LSD? ) we can get a view of Chicago from the north side of the city.

Chicago from the North Side

The shaping of the sides of the bag is a little like that of the John Hancock tower -- which you can get a lovely view of if you drive south down LSD from Lincoln Park. (The John Hancock has a lovely restaurant on the 96th floor, called The Signature Room. Pricey but nice and panoramic views are available. If you aren't up for dropping a lot of cash, but want to enjoy the view and a drink, take the elevator up one floor more and check out the bar on the 97th floor).

One of the special elements of this bag is going to be the handles. Rather than just a flat band of fabric, the strap is going to be composed of two i-cords running in parallel.

Chicago's Loop

Here's a close-up of the set up for the "Loops" in my Chicago (click here for some info on the origins of "the Loop".) I guess you could also see it as the antenna that spring up from the top of the tower. Two-4 stitch i-cords are going to start from this point. I hope this design element will work out the way I think it will. I'm a little worried that the straps will end up different lengths... but no guts, no glory! as my dad would say.

If you want to check out a little more of Chicago the city, check out Chicago Uncommon Photographs. This site/blog is full of lovely images of the city that aren't just your typical tourist perspectives. Check out the Wicker Park section if you want to see some images from my 'hood.

A Little Back Shaping

Before I started what I'm posting here, I did a miniature 1/2 size version of this bag to see if the shaping would work the way I wanted it to. It did. I was happy. It took a little less than 1/2 skein of the main color. So I thought "cool! only one skein of each color". Word to the wise... doubling the width and height of a project does more than double the yarn required (area) for the project. I know this should have been obvious to me (Julie will be laughing now for reasons too detailed to explain here). Now it should be clear why I am a biologist and not a mathematician...

Anyway. The picture above is the the shaping on the long edge of the bag. The white lines were added by me to make the shaping clearer. This is about 2/3 of the way up. Try to imagine hemi-circular.

Side Shaping

There's also shaping to the sides, but it's more gradual than the shaping on the front and back.

And that's as far as I got before that lovely charcoal colored yarn ran out. So now I've got to track down another skein of Cascade 220 in 4002. Keep your fingers crossed for me that the ThreadBears have a skein of the stuff stashed away.

Good thing I have some other things to keep myself busy with while I wait.

The Base of Chicago

Every project has to start somewhere. This one starts with a rectangular base knit in garter stitch. In retrospect, it was probably a poor choice to use the charcoal colored Cascade 220 to do my demo project in, but I wanted this bag to have a wintery stylish quality, so the black/grey combo seemed like a good call.

The ugly turquoise colored strip is scrap yarn used for an invisible cast on (in case you care, it's Cascade 220 Quattro in a color that felts up like old carpet padding and is incredibly unattractive... all it seems to be good for is scrap yarn). I prefer this cast on to picking up stitches at the edge because I think it results in smoother bag edge, at least in my hands. In case

Invisible Cast On In Action

Here's the bottom right before picking up the stitches in the invisible cast on. That ridge of black stitches is what I am going to pick up -- with the non-working needle. Like so:

Picking Up Stitches in the ICO

After you pick up the stitches, you remove the waste yarn. You can do it by a reverse Kitchener process or you can just snip the waste yarn. I have a serious fear of scissors near my projects for anything but snipping yarn tails, so I always opt for the manual approach of unthreading the last row of the invisible cast on.

All Picked Up

Once the waste yarn is removed, all you have to do is knit across that row of picked up stitches on the non-working needle. Et Voila! It's time for circular knitting to commence. And this is where the fun begins. This bag is going to be all about the shaping. It worked in the minature test bag I tried... so this double sized bigger bag will be the acid test.