buddy n.
a companion, friend or pal in an informal way
Buddy
is a happy word. It makes you smile. Try to say "Hi buddy!" without smiling! Or
try to introduce someone as your buddy with a serious face. Probably a little
tough.
Now
what the heck does buddy have to do with knitting? Well, this month's project
was inspired by a simple little email from my brother. He wrote, "I saw something at a
friend's house that seemed simple and rather useful. A knitted tube about 2 or
2-1/2 inches in diameter and about 16 inches long. It it used to hold wadded up
plastic grocery bags to take to recycling. Stretches to accommodate a ton of
those things." I knew exactly what he was asking for ... a Bag Buddy!
I
contemplated what kind of Bag Buddy I would make ... (1) a tasteful colour, (2)
a durable fiber, and (3) a nice way to hang it.
A
tasteful colour. Hmmm. I guess any colour you like can be "tasteful".
I look around my house and wardrobe and accessories and decided that for me
it's black. Do you know how many "little black dresses" I own?! More
than I probably need, but it's my go
to whenever I don't know what to wear. It's even my go to colour for knitting! So,
logically, I had decided to make the bag buddy in black.
A
durable fiber. This took a little more thought. An acrylic, wool or cotton yarn
might pill and fray from repeated rubbing with balled-up plastic bags. A nylon
yarn might work, but I haven't yet found a decent nylon yarn. Then I remembered
an old yarn -- Phentex Slipper and Craft yarn. And guess what, you can still
get it! 2 skeins of black, please.
A
nice way to hang it. I decided I would like a Bag Buddy that would hang from a
metal or wooden ring, rather than a loop of yarn. A loop of yarn would
eventually break just from normal wear-and-tear. So my design had to
incorporate a way to hang it with a ring.
One other design consideration was making a wider
opening at the top to stuff the bags in, and a narrower opening at the bottom
to extract only one bag at a time.
With
my goals set, I knitted swatches of the Phentex to decide on the needle size I
wanted to use. Next was deciding the size of the bag, which then determined how
many stitches I would cast on. And, as I so often do, I just sat down and
started knitting, deciding increases and patterns as I went along.
It
only took three tries before I had the design I envisioned. So this month, I
challenge you to make a Bag Buddy to contain any plastic shopping bags you
might have laying around. Putting them neatly into your Bag buddy will surely
make you smile!
One
last note about buddies ... every third Saturday of the month is "Knit-with-a-friend Day".
Let's call it "Buddy Knitting Day" this month! Plan now to have a
spring knitting session with your buddies on May 19th!
