Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Argyle guys

A friend of mine is going away for a while and taking his tiny laptop with him. But he's never had a case for it, and I think it's important to have a padded case to protect it.

With needles at the ready, I jumped into action!

I've never knitted an argyle before, it's a mindbending exercise in frustration. And my advice to those of you embarking on it is
Dont Get Cocky.

The MOMENT you think "ahh, I've finally got it worked out, this is easy!" you'll grab the wrong colour to knit and it'll stuff up.

But there is good news for you! Every cloud has a silver lining, and argyle's silver lining is that it's actually very forgiving. a wrong stitch here or there is actually quite hard to spot. And that makes you love it.

Even while you're hating it.

I researched argyle patterns online, and drew one out on grid paper. The pattern is much harder at the start when you don't have the previously knitted stuff to guide you. Each diamond had it's own yarn, so there was 4 strands each of grey and white and then 8 black strands for the zig zags. because I didn't have 4 balls of each colour, I cut lengths off the each ball and used that. So a lot of the padding between the laptop and the world is actually the knots where I attached more yarn to each strand.

The pattern for the bag itself is really simple, it's a long rectangle that's folded up at the bottom and over at the top. I sewed it to felt to line the bag and add an extra thickness of padding. And for a final protection, I cut the plastic bottom of a purchased shopping bag to size and inserted it between the knitting and the felt at the front of the bag. That stiffened it nicely, but made sewing the buttons on not as much fun as I'd hoped.

When I was staring at the finished argyle, the buttons just looked like eyes, and since my friend is a fun kind of guy, I decided that it just needed a tongue, to enhance the face. But because he's all corporate, I decided a tie-like tongue was the way to go.

The tongue can be folded back into the bag when needed, to show the more corporate side of things.

He loved it, and I was quite pleased.

But I think it'll be a while before I knit another argyle!

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