I have been trying create a portable knitting bag for my SIL. The idea is that she can put the loop on the ‘box’ through her belt and the bag/box part will hold a ball of yarn. The point is that she can knit while standing in line and her ball of yarn won’t roll away.
The engineering part of this has been a challenge. I didn’t see the one that she saw and only had it described to me. I searched the web for a pattern (didn’t go to the Library and look through their patterns). I wasn’t sure what to call this thing, so searching and looking in indexes was hard. I thought I was golden when I found a truffle box pattern over at Mirkwood Designs (great podcast, BTW).
Not only the pattern seem like I could blow it up and use it, thus eliminating the need to deal with proportions, but it also has style. The copy center at work helped me blow it up. Then I traced for the fabric and traced it again for the interfacing pattern and traced the square one more time for some Timtex-like stiffener. The short answer is that I couldn’t make it work. You should make the designs at Mirkwood Designs as truffle boxes, though, because I am sure they are fabulous made out of the right materials for truffles. Her recipe for the truffles sounds fabulous, too.
I have to admit that not everything works the way I intend it. This is one of those things. I am not giving up, but I have to regroup and start over.
I am not sure why it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t. One thing I do know is that the sides aren’t right. The piece has style, but no functionality. The idea was that the curves would slightly overlap the straight edge and keep the ball of yarn in. Alternatively, I thought I could also put a cute button on each side with some ribbon to wrap around it, which would keep the thing closed.
I don’t consider failing a bad thing. I am not happy about it, but failure helps me learn and that is good.
Now, back to the drawing board. Need a failed project?