FO: Felting Experiment #3: Peace out, man

First off, thanks for all nice compliments about my Flourish Vest. I think that pattern would look great on a lot people, and it would be easy to do small size adjustments since most of it is in reverse stockinette.

This is my third felting experiment. It's actually more of an experiment with intarsia and felting. I really like those small gift-bag shaped bags that you get from a lot of retail establishments. I use them often to carry a lunch or other small items for transport. I decided to make a similarly shaped tote bag that is a tribute to the sixties. You know, peace, summer of love, Woodstock, flower power, whatever. There are probably some people who believe the sixties never ended. This bag here, it's my attempt at keepin' the dream alive. Here's one side, with the peace symbol.

And on the other is my attempt at flower power. I think it would have been better if I used a different color for the center of the flower, but by then I was sort of tired of this intarsia thing.

I knitted this with Cascade 220, using two strands, and size 10 needles and size K crochet hook. I used about 3.25 skeins for the main color. Before starting, I knitted an 8"X8" square and did the whole wash-wash-dry-wash-dry cycles to get the final dimensions for gauge determination. The bag is knitted as a long rectangle, then the sides are knitted as smaller rectangles and attached with single crochet. The handles are done with half-double crochet.

Here are a few things I learned from this experiment:
- It's hard to get a good smooth stitch pattern when the gauge is large. As The Other Half said to me: "You don't have enough pixels"
- It's really important to keep yarn held on the underside during color changes very loose with a good amount of excess because the washing and drying will shrink this yarn and pull the pattern too tight if there isn't enough spare length
- I really don't have enough patience to do multi-colored knitting, especially if the yarn has to be held doubled.