Through thick and thin.

It's funny how all this time I tried to get my spinning as thin and even as possible just to realize that I've completely lost the ability to spin thick yarn. Well, I say lost. While my first skein was considerably thicker than what I do now, it probably wasn't very even either. However, I clearly remember it being better than this:

Fiber: Süddeutsche (South German) from Wollknoll. Yay for local products!

If I were a whimsical Etsy seller, I would now write something about how the yarn has retained a lot of the sheep's character and that I've created an interesting organic texture to bring out the natural colour. No. It just turned out very wonky. I wanted to try fulling a single, so I thought it would be better to make the yarn thicker. No wonder most commercial yarns are plied rather than singles! Still, the fulling was fun and not too bad, BUT even though every tutorial said not to be scared and that the individual strands wouldn't felt together, they slightly did for me. Not too badly, just enough to make them stick a little to one another. Maybe I overdid it? It does make the yarn soft yet very sturdy though, so I'll definitely experiment some more with it.
Characterful yarn aside, I did spin up some BFL that I'm very pleased with:

Pink and purple BFL from Das Wollschaf.

I had 100 grams of each, yet for some strange reason I was left with quite a bit of purple after plying. If I wasn't so lazy I'd meassure the WIP, but it's approximately a light fingering weight. ... Sometimes I wonder who came up with these names, frankly that sounds more like foreplay than fiber. But I digress. Aaaanyway, I had both singles wound on knitting needles for a while before I plied them, only to find that the yarn on the inside had already set and lost all its twist. Is that a normal thing to happen? So while plying I had to add a lot of extra spin again, which I couldn't entirely get rid off during finishing. It was mostly even, just had a few twisted bits. So against my usual preferences, I wound it into a ball in the hopes that it would set some more, much like the singles did:

I've very much taken my cue from the Zauberball school of yarn winding here.

Maybe I just tend to wind my yarn too tightly, but that 200 gram ball is only very slightly bigger than an average 50g ball of sock yarn. I do like the colour and it's as even as I've managed to spin thus far. It'll probably become a shawl in the future, something simple since the colours would probably eat up any intricate lace patterns. I quite like The Age of Brass and Lazy Daisy. Or I could just make a Baktus or one of its many variations, which have the advantage of rows that don't take half an hour to finish. Herbivore looks lovely as well, but I've grown a bit weary of shawl shapes that aren't just plain triangular.

The Discworld Bag.

Just because it took so much trial and error (mostly error), the Discworld Bag I made for the swap package gets its own damn post. You see, I had this beautiful vision in my head of a fully formed, perfectly detailed Discworld. Except it would be a project bag. How clever am I? ... yeah, not very.
People make Discworlds all the time. They crochet them, they sew them, they even bake them! They do not, however, assume that a good idea is an appropriate substitute for experience and/or talent in their chosen craft. I'm not saying that I'm horrible with a sewing machine, but working with fabric has one disadvantage that knitting usually doesn't: you just cannot fix some mistakes. This means you generally should know exactly what you want to do. Once the pieces are cut, you cannot undo them. You can only redo a seam so often before it looks shabby. That's fine for bags, which are usually simple geometric shapes. Tiny plush elephants? A bit more challenging. I sewed about 10 of them, ranging from horribly disfigured creatures of the night to the stuff of nightmares. And there are lots of cute elephant patterns to use for reference! The problem wasn't so much the technique as it was the size. I'd already bought an adorable turtle plushy so I couldn't just make the elephants bigger. In the end, I did something I'm more than a bit embarrassed about: I just glued shit on. There, I said it. I believe glue and fabric aren't two things that should go together, ever. But I was starting to panick and had a deadline and decided the elephants would just have to be 2-dimensional. Oh well. At least that meant that the bag was resting on the turtle itself, which made it a little bit bigger. It's still tiny, but maybe just big enough for a pair of mittens in progress. Maybe.
The inside of the bag has two pockets for needles and various stuff, plus the planet XXX on the bottom. I only later realized that it's actually XXXX. It really helps to look up book references if you read said book 2 years ago...

It's just about impossible to make a round map fit on a long square with any accuracy at all. I meant to sew the mountain range to the blue part as well, but then noticed I kind of like the 3D effect of it standing up even when the bag is closed. It's made from felt so there should be no fraying:

I couldn't bring myself to take photos of the disfigured elephants. These ones only have 2 legs each, but at least the ears make them somewhat recognisable. I experimented with horns, but they looked kind of odd. This is definitely the evil one, just look at that evil eye:

Maybe he's just grumpy. And this is my favourite. He looks almost like I wanted them to look originally. You know, just slighty worse:

I had planned to embroider the map onto the green part. I have access to a cheap Singer Edition which I believe was purchased at Aldi. Which really tells you all you need to know. Suffice to say that didn't really work out either, so I drew stuff on with a pen. I try not to think about it too much.

It still turned out alright I guess. The recipient seemed to like it, which is really the only thing that counts in the end.