June 20, 2026

I have now wound another 2 skeins of the Leicester.

Because I’m using the bulky doubled, I have just finished 2 skeins of the main color (grey) and one of the black/green after finishing the first cable row

June 25, 2026

So far, 5 skeins gray and 3 of the black/green

June 25, 2026

This thing is huge. When I lay it flat, it’s 26 inches across.

June 28, 2026

Finished knitting the entire body and still had a little bit of each skein of yarn left over. I used the main color -- still holding 2 strands together -- to knit the icord strap. I knit it about 10 inches longer than the circumference of the bag. It is now in the washing machine on ‘bright white’ setting with hot water and high spin for the first felting.

June 28, 2026

Oh shoot, now that it’s finished I noticed that at the start I moved up to a size 11 needle, but when I needed an extra long length (60”) to do the cables and higher, I forgot I did that and used a 10.5 needle so the top half is done again in 10.5. You can’t really tell either way.

June 29, 2026

I threw this into the washing machine to felt. It caused my washing machine to lock the door and throw errors that it couldn’t drain. I couldn’t get the door lock to override so it sat in the water overnight. The next day I was finally able to get the water drained and get the door open. I suspect there was so much fuzz from the wool that it clogged the drains. I didn’t dare try running it through a second time to continue felting.
I tossed it into the dryer and it didn’t shrink much but definitely became thicker. There were big handfuls of fuzzy wool in the drier lint trap.

The wool felted, but the green yarn didn’t so the green part is still pretty floppy.