Felting and a Feature

I have really been enjoying the Blogger's Quilt Festival this week and it was a ton of fun to participate.  My Waves of Gratitude quilt was featured on Stephanie Lynn's Sunday Showcase Party this week as well.  Thank you!! 

I have loved every one of the comments on that quilt, too.  If I haven't responded to your comment directly, it's only because grad school is hitting the home stretch for me and my work load has increased significantly.  Probably my blogging will be a bit lighter through the first week of December because of it.

I have been transitioning into making Christmas presents as well.  Mostly still in the planning stages as of yet, but I have been trying to make myself a felted school bag.  I've never felted before, but I started with some Paton's Classic Wool Roving in a couple different colors and have started experimenting.

I started by basically crocheting a potholder-sized test swatch because I needed to figure out how the pieces would be shrinking.  This piece measured 8.25 inches before felting.

Then I threw it in the washing machine (warm water and detergent) with some laundry and then dried it on hot.  This is what I got...

It shrunk a bit, but I'm really glad that I did this swatch first because I learned that it did not shrink as much along the height of the stitches as it did on the width.  The length decreased to 7.5 inches and the width decreased to 6.75 inches.  Interesting...

I may actually try running through the machine again to see if I can make the stitches even less obvious.

Originally I was envisioning a bag that had maybe a checkerboard pattern of grey and blue blocks with black dividing each of the blocks, but now I'm thinking maybe stripes...  I may also switch to knitting and see what kind of changes that produces.  We'll have to see.