Hi Ric, still there?

yes, I finished my strange knitting and it became… a toilet bag. (“Kulturbeutel”, you know… don’t know why it’s called like that in German… The pics are below in this entry.

So… now you know… 😉

And now as promised, the English text, that belongs to the pics of the entry below.

(Wer kein Englisch spricht: Keine Sorge, ihr verpaßt nichts, es ist die Übersetzung von dem, was ihr schon gelesen habt.)

Quite a long time ago I did some dyeing experiments with wool and colours for easter eggs.

Some time later I did knit it up and felt it in my washing machine.

I wanted to make something of it, preferably even something usefull… I looked on my felted cloth and went looking for all kinds of embroidery floss, galons, rickrack, beads, buttons,… crocket hooks, needles… I could find and I liked the colour with my cloth.

And I just let it happen. “Heavy embellishing” is probably the word… I never really learned to embroider. I mean, at school, very, very long ago, we did some simple cross stitch, but I was never good on that and I do not really know anything about it. But I have books… Well, es I said, I just let it happen… I did something, then I added something else… and finally a sea(shore) scene happend. (There wasn’t much of a plan…)

Finally it’s Summersets “fault”;-) Her great wearable art encouraged me, just to try and mix techniques. Apart from the inspiration, of course, I don’t compare to her. She is doing great artistic things, mine is… maybe “art brut”, but then more the “brut” side, than “art”. But I enjoyed doing it.

After some layers of stuff, bands, beads, stitches,… on the cloth I decided it was enough and sewed it up as a small bag.

I bought a pretty patchwork fabric in blue-green-gold as a lining, braided handles from simple cord… and remembered that this bag (more purse?) wouldn’t match any of my clothes. Neither my style in clothing. So would I ever use it?

But what I was needing for years was a new toilet bag. (I’m travelling quite a lot and I was mostly using plastic bags the last years. No style in that…) Only that should be kind of waterproof on the inside. My cotton lining was far trom that, of course.

But Freudenberg (Vliseline) has a great thing, a plastic foil you can iron on and therefor laminate the fabric. Never tried… And I was quite reluctant to use it, afraid it would stick to my iron…

Well, it did not, it worked!  (Lucky me…) It got stiff, but still managable and I could sew a second bag (long stitches on the sewing machine) as a lining and attach it by hand to the zipperband. That was the not so funny part… as I said, the laminated fabric is stiff….

And voila, my new toilet bag!

And has succesfully travelled with me to India and when my cleansing milk leaked inside, I could wipe it away with a tissue.

So it’s a strange bag, but I like it. 🙂