Liner Modification

I used a cloth lining and started it attaching it according to the pattern’s instructions with an added drawstring in a hem around the opening, but was unhappy with how the bag’s shape would be distorted in drawing it closed. It’ll spend most of its life guarding its contents, after all, but I would like it to look glorious sitting around and doing so.

To combat this, I improvised a kind of collar around the neck of the cloth lining, so that the lining could be drawn closed without pulling the face or neck of the outer knitted creature into a narrow bunch. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and took some pictures which I hope show how it works.

I basically just cut a circle the relaxed diameter of the knitted bag at row 32 across out of my lining material and cut an inner concentric circle out of it - both with maybe a centimeter of edge allowance - ending up with something sort of donut-shaped. The inner circle had to be big enough so the bag could reasonably open, but not so big that the collar wouldn’t add enough width to the closed bag so that the could look comfortably nefarious instead of squished when the drawstring is closed.

I then cut little perpendicular slices into the interior and exterior edge allowances of the collar, which there’s probably a technical term for that I don’t know but which I learned from a sewing pattern for COVID-19 masks with curved edge herms. I folded these down into the murky void between liner and knitted outer bag and used my best approximation of the overcast stitch (which I thank at least two of y’all who knit this before me for recommending) to attach first the inner edge to the liner of the bag, not quite an inch below the drawstring, and then the outer circumference to the outer knit bag.

There are several places where I effectively needed to pleat the collar to make it line up right with the outer bag while sewing it in, but I think that’s actually helped make it open better and it looks okay to me, unpolished though it may be. With planning and more sewing acumen, you, dear reader, can improve on this.

Now, when I close the bag, it still looks right to me.

Tight tentacle ringlets

One thing I was worried about when I looked at other projects made from this pattern was making the tentacles look appropriately perky. I liked one other project’s tighter curls and thought about how to make mine turn out that way too.

I settled on casting on each tentacle loosely, knitting its first row loosely, and then knitting the k2t reduction row and bind off tightly.

I followed that by basically putting the little suckers in improvised curlers. I twisted them to curl in a consistent spiral then squished them flat (like squashing a spiral cut apple made with an old fashioned crank-and-slice machine back into apple shape) and then securing them with safety pins, compressed like that, overnight.

This safety pin thing also kept the tentacles out of the way while I worked out the liner, which with eleven tentacles (ymmv) helped a lot, and I’m happy with the end result.

Hurray And Beware!

I can’t wait to see how my spouse receives this solstice/yuletide/etc present. I’d intended to make them one last year - they’ve never had one and it’s a miracle all their dice haven’t escaped by now. I have a satin drawstring bag that once held soap samples from my college’s health center for a dice bag, which I painted a dragon onto with watercolors ages ago, but I’m kinda tempted to make myself one now.

Also, I can’t highly enough recommend using a cheery patterned fabric for lining to combats any overtones of Lovecraft’s bigotry problems. There’s good Eldritchy and then there’s rotten old BS, after all.