Stripes are a good thing

I will now introduce my children to you all. I have a senior in high school this year, I will call her DragonNight (DN for short). She is my first born and a very talented artist. She has been drawing since before she could write. I remember her preschool teacher sending home a little picture she had drawn, entitled 'Duck', and it really looked like a duck! She has always enjoyed drawing and has taken art classes through the school since 7th grade. She is now working at making it her career and therefore has her own website DragonNight Art and is working at selling her art on finished products at Zazzle.com.


My youngest is in 5th grade this year and was just placed in the Highly Capable Program, I'll call her Little Bigfoot (LBF for short). Her online nickname came about when I was buying her shoes earlier this year and she had jumped into a women's size 7 1/2 at her young age. I have no illusions that I won't be the shortest person in my family at 5'8", when my children are fully grown. DN already is taller than me by at least an inch and LBF isn't far behind.


Last year LBF wanted a felted bag for her school bag, so we picked out yarn colors and a pattern and I made her a bag that was faithfully used all year long. This year, she is now needing to carry her binder back and forth daily and that bag is just a little bit of a tight squeeze, so she requested a new bag. We picked out some gorgeous colors of yarn from Knitpicks.com and I searched for just the right pattern. Due to the fact that I don't make a lot of felted projects, I always feel more confident that I'll get close to desired size, if I start with a pattern, so I searched everywhere, for a messenger style bag that had dimensions listed and would be generous enough for her binder, but not too large for a kid of her age. I eventually found something that would fit the bill with the Practical Messenger Bag from Let's Knit.co.uk. I didn't really care for their construction and wanted to knit a true chevron pattern (rather than a fair isle technique), so decided to work with their numbers for size and make up the rest of the pattern for myself. Here is what I have so far:

It is coming along fairly well. I'm working it single stranded on size 6 needles and am over half way up the sides. I'm planning on continuing the pattern on one side up for the flap and then on the sides for the handle, which I'll graft at the middle point. Then throw it in the washing machine to felt. We are also planning on lining it, which will give us the opportunity to add some interior pockets as well. I was hoping to finish the knitting by this weekend, but had to take a break earlier this week, due to my arm acting up, so did not make quite as much progress as I had hoped. Still I should have it finished by early next week, then we'll shop for the perfect fabric to line it.