High Stress Knitting

I don't felt often. I love the look of felted knits, it's just that the process of felting scares the pants off me. There's no turning back if it goes horribly wrong. Not that I've had anything go wrong yet, but it could and if I'd spent a lot of money on pretty yarn that turned into a worthless mess it'd take me a long time to get over it.

I had the patterns for the Buttonhole Bag and the sweater with the little horsies on it in a project bag with the yarn and needles, so last night after the kids were in bed I cast on and started knitting before I lost my nerve. By midnight, I had the horses almost done and was starting to worry that the stranded color work might not felt right. I was a good little knitter and waited until morning to finish the top handles instead of rushing through them and trying to felt it at 2am. Which I've done before -- that's definitely hard on the nerves!

I can't believe how easily this thing felted. Four minutes of agitation and it looked pretty good. A couple more minutes and it was done! I did knit a swatch and sort of felt it in the sink to make sure the different brands of wool I used would play nicely together, but I'm still amazed it felted so quickly.

 I used a single strand of worsted weight wool (Plymouth Galway and Knitpicks WOTA) and sort of kind of followed the pattern for the shaping, adding increase rows to get enough stitches for the horse pattern,making it taller, and making the buttonholes wider. The whole process probably didn't take more than four hours total.