This UFO was born from a very vintage skein of yarn that I got from my Mom's uber-stash. I don't remember, to be honest, what the yarn was called or even the fiber content. What I do remember is that this particular skein of yarn had been floating around in my mom's house since I was a wee little one in the late 70's, early 80's. When my mom had me cull her stash for her about 5 years ago, I grabbed a bunch of these ye olde skeins that I could remember from my early childhood, thinking that if she hadn't used them by now she wasn't going to. And, they had a sort of vintage appeal to them at that point, too.
The yarn appears to be 100% fuzzy acrylic, but part of me wants to say that it also had some wool or mohair mixed in. It was billed as a tweed yarn, and was 2 contrasting colored yarns that were worked together to create the tweed effect. In this particular skein, the strands were a peachy-apricot and a peachy-brown.
Since I only had one skein of this to work with, and the colors weren't suitable for me to wear, my options were fairly limited. In the end, I decided on a purse. It was knit in two pieces: a large rectangle for the body, back, and bottom; and a long, thin piece for the strap. All the knitting was done in stockinet, and I really liked how the "tweed" worked up. I got the bag all assembled and the top kept curling because it was stockinet, so I worked 2 rows of single crochet around the top and that fixed that. In the process, I also added a loop to hold the bag closed. I still had a bit of yarn left, so I seperated the strands and made 6 crochet roses for the lower front corner of the bag.
With the bag all assembled, I moved on to lining. I got all the pieces sewed together fine and then when I put the lining in place to check for size, I noticed that when I sewed the strap of the bag in place, I'd twisted it several times. Oh, dookie. I didn't have enough yarn left so I could remove the strap and reattach it properly, so it just stayed that way. I used the little bit I did have left to sew the edges of the strap together to make it a tube so the gaff was less noticable. But the strap still neaded to be lined for stability. In the end, I just hemmed the edges of a narrow strip of fabric and ran it through the tube and connected it to the bag lining.
And then, it sat.
And sat. And any time I straightened up my craft area, I'd come across it and wonder why I hadn't sewn the lining in yet and it'd get cast aside again to be overlooked for a few more months.
So, today, the first day of the UFO knit-a-thon, I pulled it out and threaded a needle. It took all of 15 minutes to sew the lining in place and another 10 minutes to pick a button for the front and sew that in place, too. And, voila, I give you my first FO of the knit-a-thon:
Cue the trumpets!
