what on earth is wrong with me?

Yesterday, Chris went to his mum's to borrow her car so he could get to work (snow problems...bus problems..walking impossibility). Unfortunately when he arrived, not one but two vehicles were parked across the driveway so he couldn't get out. One of said vehicles was a BIG-ASS TRUCK of the sort that many people drive in Saskatoon, obviously assuming that to be a real westerner you need some sort of gas-guzzling, lane-filling, small-car-ignoring, BIG-ASS TRUCK.
So Chris went doorknocking but nobody was in. By this time it was, y'know, time to go to work, and they ended up having to get the truck towed.

So in the evening, a knock at the door came, and it was the truck owner, wondering if they had, on the off-chance, seen a BIG-ASS TRUCK that was lately parked right across their driveway. Informed that it had been towed, the gentleman in question looked so surprised and kind of - hurt - as if it made him not angry and aggressive at the person who had his truck removed, ncessitating a $300 fine for getting it back, but just sort of saddened that his lovely truck would be stuck in the Wilderness of Towing Land and would need to be rescued.

After this, I began to feel sorry for the truck man who had looked so sad about his truck, instead of justified because he TOTALLY PARKED ACROSS SOMEONE'S DRIVEWAY in a stupid gas-guzzling pedestrian-despising BIG-ASS TRUCK and got what he deserved.

What on earth is wrong with me?

The bag handle is still coming. I'm getting there. Stitch by yanked stitch.

And it's still snowing. We're up to about, oooh, probably thirty or forty feet by now.

The weather outside is frightful, by the way

So this is what I have at the moment. The bag is pinned out and blocked, and I have bent all my pins by pinning it into the carpet because I don't have those pinny-out tile things that real knitters have. The two coloured bits are for the sides of the bag, and I may or may not need them. I thought I would not have enough tweed to do a handle that went all the way to the bottom of the bag, so I made sides in nice bright wool and it took me about two seconds compared with working with the tweed.

Ah, the handle...I am using the tweed cos I have lots of it, but I decided to knit on smaller needles that the main bag because I figured the handle needs to be pretty robust. It's killing me. I am knitting nine stitches in a row, that's it, and it takes forever. Each stitch has to be yanked through, hard. At the end of each row, I sit and look at it for five minutes and try to decide whether to carry on or rip it out and go back to the big fat needles.

Incidentally, it is still snowing, and the temp. is currently minus 26 degrees C. I need to go out for milk and bread this afternoon. Yesterday when I went out in this temperature, the tiny letterbox of my face that was exposed to the cold, around my eyes, got windburned. On the weekend the Vanier Cup - the national university football tournament - was held here, and the temperature on the field was minus thirty.

Today's factoid - the Saskatchewan University campus is officially the second coldest in the world. The coldest is Moscow.

And finally, in case you think I seem to have an awful lot of time on my hands for mindless yakking and knitting, may I point out that today is my "kend" - ie the second day of my weekend. And I am prevented from doing very much else today because it's So. Flippin. Cold.

so then what happened was...

Snip snip snip...and lo, there was Yarn. The Bag pattern I'm looking at wants 800 yards of it. I have something like 200 yards. But it is extremely fat compared with proper wool.
The Bag pattern also requires felting. I know nothing about felting. I barely know anything about knitting. I knitted up a swatch (yes! I really did!) and, lacking quarters for the washing machine, attempted "hand felting". This, to me, means swishing it around in a sink of very hot water for about ten minutes till I got bored. Needless to say, no change to the swatch.

Executive decision: The bag will not felt. Therefore it won't shrink. Therefore I don't need 800 yards. Therefore I can just get started.

First go...

Morning to all...

It's my first go at a blog. Although this is nt really a blog of me. It's a blog of A Bag.

The bag in question began life like this just a short time ago.

It's a pile of tweed that mum gave me and I have never quite found the right project for it, until now.

It turns out that I can only add one photo per post (or rather that I am not clever enough to work out how not to have all my photos sitting at the top of the post). And this is such a good photo story that I must post this and then start a new one to show you the next step of The Bag.