Just a bag of bits?

Not just any bag of bits! This is a bag of bamboo needles and yarn, a bag of words and pictures and a magic tape measure!

 This story starts on a cold winters morning......

Now then, when I wake in the morning I have time to think.

I'm aware of just how fortunate I am to have this luxury, no alarm clocks for me or rush hour traffic.

I get to lie for a while and think, sometimes I lie for a long time and think a lot .Especially when it's very cold.   It was on one of these mornings I thought about felting kits.

If folk could knit and felt a phone pouch to fit their own phone, that would be a very good thing.

 

But how?

 The maths for working out stitch counts and row numbers, like anything is not difficult once you know what you are doing, but how to make it accessable to novices?

And then my Eureka moment!

Now I know I don't think like other folk, but at times it does have it's advantages.

Instead of measuring and number crunching, I could make a measuring tape with stitch count on one side and cm's to knit on the other? Then all people would  need to do would be to wrap the tape around their mobile phones and they would be knitting and felting in no time.

Armed with this new idea

I had lots of work to do, making and testing prototypes, writing instructions, asking friends to try out the kit and sourcing equipment.

Which is not so very interesting ,so I'll skip all that and jump to:-

Delivery Day!

On this day 100 sets of bamboo knitting needles arrived.

Within an hour the doorbell rang again and all the packaging for the kits was here.

And then the yarn arrived too. Winding it into 20gm balls was not as tedious as you might think.

I had a very good audio book to listen to whilst I worked!

 

I don't mind telling you I had a little panic that day. 

I still needed the instruction booklet  (all credit here to my husband who edited and printed it!)

After all what use were the needles and yarn without the all important information on how to actually knit and felt?

 We had a lot of fun when my lovely daughter became my hand model for the photo shoot. Fortunately she can knit very well, so after much giggling we had the close ups of how to knit with 4 double ended needles and hand felt the finished pouch.

My enthusiam carried me along and although I have lots of ideas for more kits, 

I kept things simple and created a second kit, this time for a little purse.

I was a little bit nervous when I took the kits to the next craft fair, but I need not have worried all my crafting friends were very supportive (some even bought kits!)

Displayed in felt bags (of course) they looked fine and I'm happy to say were well recieved too!

So that is the story of these kits. I had no idea they would take so much time to produce, but  I certainly wish I had found one 4 years ago when I started  learning to knit and felt!!!!