Ye Olde UFO.

There's been a UFO sitting in my office for ages now, and it's finally, finally getting closer to completion - it's a sprang piece, and I don't even want to find out how many years it has been on the Un-Finished Object list. Eventually, it is going to become a bag... eventually.

The setup for this was circular, as I wanted to try this version, and wanted the bag bottom to be as stretchy as possible. This means that at the start, you have to carry the sheds around to the back of the work - which was tedious. Then there comes that glorious moment when you can work on the one side only.

My original plan was to make the shoulder strap/handle part of the bag narrower by using two or more threads at a time as one element. However, I tried that, and the way it looked didn't please me at all. So I decided that since this was a learn-and-practice piece, I might as well narrow down the strap by working double-layer sprang.

[caption id="attachment_5060" align="alignnone" width="436"] The double-layer part and its ever diminishing remaining shed...


Double-layer sprang, as the name implies, means you work two separate layers at once, handling one thread crossing from the back layer, then one from the front layer, and so on. So you don't have two sheds but one - and the only thing you have to be careful of is not to cross a back-layer thread into the front layer by accident, or vice versa. It also adds a little twist (hah!) to the crossing of the front layer threads, as you have to go around the back layer thread sitting on your one hand to do that.

Which is a little brain-twisting, but fun. There were a few smaller mistakes and a few ones bad enough that I went back a bit to re-do things. I did learn quite a bit, and working in two layers is much more fluent now than at the beginning, though I am still not out of the mumbling-to-myself stage.

You might be familiar with that stage - when you are learning a new technique, or a new pattern, and there's steps to do (or to repeat), and you sit there and tell yourself the steps. Over and over and over again. That telling can be something as simple (and seemingly daft) as going "one, two, one, two, ..." or "knit, knit, slipslipknit", and after a while it seems stupid to still need to be doing it, because how hard can remembering two or three simple steps be?

Well. I have learned, over the years, that it can be harder than one would think - after all, it's not just remembering two or three simple steps. It is also building up motor skills, and learning to recognise how things look when they are correct, and how they look when they are not, and learning how to correct mistakes. So even if it feels really weird to mumble the same things to me over and over and over again, for every single step, for what feels like ages - I know, these days, that it will just take as long as it does. Eventually, the voice gets more quiet. At one point, it disappears, and that's when you have the new thing down pat.

So there's a bit more to do on my piece (I go "front layer, back layer, front layer, back layer" with each thread manipulation, by the way). It is, however, getting very tight for my left hand... and that is some cause of concern for me. I've figured out how to do the thread manipulation the right hand needs to do with a knitting needle (as you do towards the end of sprang), but trying to replace the left one has, in the last few tries, always resulted in complete and utter failure of the row.

Which means it will stay interesting... or I will have to split up the layers and do them one by one soon.

I shall keep you updated. (Unless, of course, the thing manages to go back into UFO state despite my efforts... then I will keep you updated at a much later point in time.)