Up Again

I've knitted the flap and back of my clutch bag, so now I have to turn the chart around again to knit the front.

Backward

I did have a false start - it boggles the mind a little to work the chart upside down - but now I think I'm on track to work the tulips for the back of the bag. I worked two rows in plain white where the fold will be.

Count Twice, Knit Once

I've made a start on my second version of the beaded knitting tulip bag. As I've said before, the most time-consuming part is fixing mistakes. A join can't be made in the middle of a row (trust me, I've tried!) so if a bead has been wrongly placed, the row must be unpicked, the beads restrung correctly and the row reknitted. This necessitates cutting the yarn, so a lot of mistakes results in a lot of ends to be sewn in. So....  I'm trying earnestly to avoid mistakes by checking each row of beads strung before I slide it down.

Upside Down

Something that has bothered me vaguely about the tulip pattern (scroll down to previous post) is that when the knitting is folded to make a bag, part of it will be upside down. I assured myself that that didn't matter, but it nagged at me none the less. This morning I had a brainwave - knit part of it upside down, so that it's the right way up when folded! I confess that I thought the flap would be upside down, but when I folded the tulips realised that it is the back part of the bag that would be reversed. Hmm. I was prepared to undo two rows of flowers to redo the flap, but not four rows. I'll have to start over. Thinks, thinks, I've decided to do the three parts of the bag in the same colour order, rather than the random arrangement of the first one. Now I have  'It'll be just like starting over' singing loudly in my head.

Tulips

I've finished my beaded knitting. I'm going to wait until I have a magnetic clasp before I turn it into a clutch bag. The beaded knitting process is simple enough, it's sorting out mistakes that is time consuming. Sort them out I did, and I'm happy with the result.

Back To Beads

I managed to buy a few more bead colours locally, so I've gone back to my bead knitting. It's not always easy to find beads in the right size and colour.

I don't know why there are big white spaces on my blog page. They're rather unsightly.

Prep

A friend of mine who doesn't have access to the internet gave me a link to a tutorial on YouTube for a tutorial on joining granny squares as you go. Here's the link to it.  The tutorial by Bella Coco uses a different method to the one I've used. I promised Zandra  I would watch the video and then show her what to do when we see each other tomorrow. We'll be short of time tomorrow, so I've worked some squares with scrap yarn to the joining stage. I hope she's a quick learner!