Bag Fail

I have this awesome book that I picked up from a used book store entitled “Big Book of Knitting”.  Sure, the colors are out of date and the intarsia patterns are reminiscent of those on the Cosby Show but there’s still a lot of wonderful information to be found inside its covers.  It was the section on pockets that inspired me to try a new project.

I have a confession- I’ve never knitted pockets and I’ve been dying to try out an invisible pocket technique.  Instead of knitting up a small piece of fabric and trying out this new skill like a sane person would, I decided to knit up an entire project on the fly and insert a few lovely pocket tricks.  A bag seemed like a great project for this.  Never mind that I’ve only knitted one successful bag and it was felted…

So, I knit up a garter stitch rectangle and picked up stitches along the sides.  Then I cleverly made increases for a few rounds to give it that puffy big-bag look.  Oh, and I was going to keep the sides in moss stitch and the front and back would be a cool honeycomb pattern which I was too lazy to actually look up so I just started stitching, sure that I had it right.

And now I hate it.  It looks ridiculous.  The honeycomb pattern is all wrong and it looks like weird slitted fabric.  The garter stitch bottom was not a good idea because the bag sags and all I can see is the garter stitch stripe at the bottom.  AND, I haven’t even reached the pocket insertion point so I haven’t even gotten to try out the technique this whole bag was about.

FAIL!

Oh well.  I learned how not to make a knitted bag.  And, they all can’t be winners.

I still love my knitted/felted bag that I improvised a couple of years ago. I carry it around with me when I’ve got small knitting projects, like socks.  It gives me the false confidence to plunge ahead on projects without much preparation or planning.  🙂