Knit stitches = pixels, right? So if I account for the not-quite-squareness of them, I can translate a pixelated image to a knitted thing.

Stuff I’ve never done before: stranded two-color, holding one color in each hand, knitting huge complicated long-float pictures (which I designed myself, so I have no one else to blame), felting. I am hoping this giant weird floppy bag gets better when I felt it, because right now it’s pretty awful. The pixelated fractal pictures actually seemed to work fairly well, though.

The experimental gauge swatch did what it was supposed to do, so maybe that counts as a hopeful sign.

Size of the bag before felting: about 12” wide x 18” high x 8” deep.

…

After the first trip through the washing machine, the bag was quite felted, but still pretty floppy. Also, the middle had shrunk much more than the top and bottom, so it was kind of hourglass-shaped. I thought it would probably be improved with another session of washing, to see if it would shrink some more and maybe even out a bit, but I didn’t get around to it for a while. Then the washing machine died (I think for unrelated reasons).

The new washer is one of those front-loading kind that’s supposed to be gentler on clothes, and I was worried that it wouldn’t agitate the bag enough to felt. But I threw it in anyway, and it got a lot better. Now it’s very approximately 8-1/2” wide by 11” high, and maybe 4” deep. It’s sturdy enough to stand up on its own, and the weird hourglass-waisted shape is reduced to a moderate flare. It didn’t shrink quite as much vertically as I had expected, but the pattern distortion is minimal. I think I’ll call it a success.