Blue Waves, Sandy Beaches and Felted Treasure Bags

Door County, Wisconsin is known for its cherry and apple orchards, its beautiful weather, and its hundreds of miles of sandy beaches. We took The Girls on a long weekend up there, and spent most of our time walking and swimming the beaches on the Lake Michigan side of the peninsula.

As usual, I took some of my textbooks and a loom with me. I usually bring a looming project when I travel, because I am an early riser (unlike everyone else in my family!) and need something to do when everyone else is asleep and it's too dark to read. After the first morning on that blue water, and after taking many, many photos, I wanted to use my loom to capture those images.

I have never been a bag woman. I have always made do with what I could carry in my pockets and hands, and left everything else at home. Then I joined the Cell Phone Nation, and realized that pockets are no place to carry cell phones (they tend to get miffed with you and dial Afghanistan if you leave them there too long). But fat sacks, bulky bags, and clunky carriers just aren't me.

The Girls always travel with homemade "treasure bags" designed to be filled with the stones and rocks and sparkly things that little girls love to find and save. My goal was to make a small felted "treasure bag" of my own. I grabbed a skein of deep, watery blue wool, and another of a sandy off-white. I could picture what I wanted to create, and started to loom. Using alternating rows of knits and purls (your basic garter stitch), I knit a panel of white with a wave of watery blue on one edge. My very own Loon Looms 10" SG (3/8") rake loom gave me a 6" width, and I kept adding rows and color until I reached a length of about 15". At that point, I took it off the loom, then used the same loom to knit five feet of four-peg I-cord in the same blue.

I folded up a little over a third of the length to make the body, and whipstitched about six inches of the I-cord in between both edges to give it some depth. Now all that's left is the felting, and if this bag felts up like other projects, it should lose about a quarter to a third of its width, but only about ten percent of its length.


Time to Felt

Felting is a pretty simple process — throw your project in the hot-water wash until it shrinks. I have a washing machine that is a great felter, and this time was no different. I tossed my almost-finished treasure bag into a zippered pillow case, then into the "super wash" hot cycle with a tablespoon of detergent and a few pairs of my daughters' jeans for extra agitation. I set it for an extra cold-rinse cycle, and when it was done, it was done. Of course I checked it a few times in between — that's part of the fun of felting! But when it was done, I had the most beautiful Door County treasure bag I could imagine.


The final size is approximately 4 3/4" square, and the strap allows it to hang 18" down from my shoulder. Using a piece of wave-worn shell I found on the Northport beach, I fashioned a toggle closure, cut a buttonhole in the flap, and put it together.

Not a bad memento of a wonderful getaway.