Cecilia’s Diary

(Also known as Kit Crazy part I)

This is my very first swap.  Ever.  Having said that, as soon as I started thinking about a bag I wanted to try to design and sew one myself.  I’ve been sewing for MUCH longer than I’ve been knitting, especially considering I’ve been knitting for just over a month now, and crocheting for about two months longer than that.

Knowing I wanted to sew the bag, I had to start thinking about a design.  I know that Penelope is not very stationary, so the bag needed to be able to travel well.  Having a background in some aspects of her current life, I know she’s probably around a lot of dust and dirt on occasion.  That ruled out fabrics of a nonwashable nature (as if I’d even consider dry clean fabrics for a kit bag, but still!!!) and required, in my mind, some major sturdiness.  Imagine my surprise (and glee) when I came across silver corduroy fabric in the Red Tag section of the local big box fabric store!!!  Silver, not so much gray.  Fabric for main body of bag?  Check.

The next step was designing the actual bag.  I had seen a really interesting chart of the Slytherin snake and decided to do it in filet crochet to cover one side of the bag.  I had some leftover Lion Brand Wool-ease in Forest Green Heather from making a Slytherin scarf for Malcolm, and set to work.  Within rows, however, I realized that I would be INSANE to make a bag as big as the snake was turning out to be.  Oops.  Back to the drawing board.  I knew I wanted a snake on one side of the bag, so I allowed myself to mull over that and went back to overall bag design.

The dimensions of the bag itself ended up being somewhere around 8×10x3″, which is just about the size of a small canvas tote bag.  As I designed it, I started thinking that I really wanted it to be able to open up for quick access to small pockets.  A quick look in my huge stash of random sewing stuff that will be “useful someday” I find to my relief a strip of snaps on cotton webbing stuff.  Score!  The pockets get designed so that on one side, they’ll hold all the yarn for a sock project.  The other side has a series of shorter pockets that can hold stitch markers, scissors, etc.  Two of the shorter pockets are narrow enough to hold a set of short DPNs without easily offering them to the gods of lost needles.   The inside has to be as pretty as the outside since it’ll be able to open.  Okay!  Let’s get to work!

to be continued…