Aaargh!

You wouldn't believe it, I just wrote a really long and fascinating blog, and then somehow the browser screws up, so I just spent the last 45 minutes trying to fix the problem, and now I've forgotten what I was talking about. Hmph. Here goes again.

Here's where I'm up to with the skull bag:

There are these pockets on the outside which the Andeans call unas. Basically, while you're knitting the body of the main bag, where you want the una openings you knit in a bit of scrap yarn. When the body's finished, you pull out the scrap yarn, pick up the stitches and knit the una/pocket. The opening's on the inside, and the una's on the outside. They look a bit like testicles (sorry). So, all I have left is two and a half unas, drawstrings, shoulder strap, skull beads, and I need to sew down the floats so they don't catch on things when I use the bag. Quite a bit to go, but it's all good fun.

Now for a bit of a whine:

Whine No. 1: Badly written patterns. Andean Folk Knits is a fantastic book, I love it to bits, it has the most fascinating patterns and social history and customs etc., but the patterns are really badly written. Or I shoud say, drawn. They're all charts, which is fine, since all of the patterns are so intricately decorated, but the chapter on techniques just isn't detailed enough, and there are some major flaws, which I wrote into the post that didn't work, but I think that it was really a bit boring, so it's just as well it's gone forever. Anyway, the result of this was that I basically ended up re-designing the whole bag, which is pretty cool, because it's much more fun to design your own stuff than just follow someone's directions. Well, I think it's more fun anyway. So, after much stuffing around, I decided to just do whatever I wanted with the pattern, so I did this to the bottom of the bag:

Yes, it's that star thingo, where you K2tog evenly spaced around each and every row. I love it. So simple, yet effective. Also looks great on sock toes. You can hardly see it in this photo, which brings me to:

Whine No. 2: Crappy digital camera lighting and colours. Just look at the state of those two photos! I can't get the damn things right! That last pic was the best of about 20! 'Nuff said.

Oh yeah, and you may have noticed that I've put up a piccie of me. Scary stuff! Luckily the photo's too small to be too offensive!