the everyday adventures of sabrina

this was my very first knitting project, which i finally finished yesterday: i had knit all the pieces and finished it up on my vacation in mid-july, but i hadn’t blocked them or put them together yet.

this started out as an attempt to make Zeeby’s Bag, out of Stitch ‘n Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook — it didn’t turn out quite like planned. for starters, the dimensions are supposed to be 12″ tall by 15″ wide. not sure what happened here, because i was measuring religiously while knitting (and i did so remember to do a swatch!), but my panels ended up 11″ by 17″. a bit more rectangular than planned. also, i decided to change the handles to i-cord so they’d be roundy and retain shape better, and i decided to line it so that i could put things with pointy edges — keys, pens, stuff like that — in there without them poking out. anyways, yesterday i finally blocked it (even though i used woolease, i thought it was worth a shot — especially because the two sides were, before blocking, wildly different in width — one was 16″, the other 18″. as you can see from the first photo, though, blocking didn’t entirely solve that problem, though i think it did help). then i machine sewed the lining together, sewed the bag together, hand-sewed the lining in (i thought machine-sewing it would look obnoxiously obvious), then finally attached the handles. et voilà!

like that accidental, asymmetrical gusset on the left bottom corner? um.. it adds visual excitement! yeah!

i like my swanky purple lining fabric. i need more things that need to be lined with swanky purple lining.

just to give you an idea of the size…

so. i have completed, ladies and gentlemen, THREE WHOLE KNITTING PROJECTS. (tea cosy, zeeby’s bag, and the fun-fur shawl i made for my little cousin in arkansas, because she has puppy-dog eyes.) i feel pretty bad-ass at the moment. BRING THE YARN!

i drink a lot of tea. you wouldn’t know it if your only experience with my beverage choices is seeing me at work — wherein i usually drink coffee (and a pretty good amount of it) — but i actually prefer tea in most circumstances. circumstances that don’t equate “tea” with “lipton bagged crap that really ought not to be called tea because it’s so crap,” i mean. free hint for tea manufacturers: wrapping teabags in paper packaging that doesn’t actually keep air out is, um, not so very useful when it comes to attempting to preserve any deliciousness your tea might ever conceivably have had in the past.

yeah, tea snob.

anyways, at work, i have a coffeemaker with an insulated carafe, an electric kettle, and an odd little glass teapot i got for like $5 at ikea. now, like i said, i usually make coffee — other people like to drink the coffee, and i like having people come visit me, so making coffee facilitates the slack. and whenever i make a pot of tea, i’m the only one who drinks it, and it usually goes cold before i can finish the entire pot, so i generally don’t bother.

but i recently took up knitting. and knitting juxtaposed with a cold pot of tea gave me the idea that i could knit a tea cosy. because i totally, totally could. so i did.

hereafter, i will rock out with delicious hot tea any time i want it at work. hot tea! rock out!

now i just need to finish blocking and sewing together the tote bag for which i completed the knitting about three weeks ago, and i will have two completed projects! (not counting the dozen or so cat-toys i’ve made by knitting various practice swatches, sewing them into a bag, and stuffing them with catnip…)