Knitting

I have been knitting a messenger bag for my boyfriend, it seems like forever, but in reality it has been a few months.  I am knitting it out of Bernat Felting, which I have never used before in the Storm Cloud colour way.  This is going to be a felted bag, which I have also never done.  The pattern is from the book Bag Style by Pam Allen and Ann Budd. 

I liked a lot of the bags in this book, so I picked it up.  My boyfriend is always really encouraging, and loves all the crafty things that I do, he flipped through the book and asked me to make him this bag.  He liked the idea of being able to custom make what ever he wanted.  His request is to make extra pockets on the inside.  The only issue I have with knitting this is that it is miles and miles of stockinette, and because the bag is being felted, everything gets knit twice as large, then shrunk down in the felting process, which makes the knitting take forever.  I have posted the pictures before the felting process. 

This is the back, front and flap.

This is the gusset.

My boyfriend saw that I was getting tired of knitting this, so he asked if I could teach him how to knit.  So, since this bad is simple, I got him to knit what is in the picture above, the zipper bands, and the extra pockets he wanted.  It went very well, his gauge is a lot tighter than mine, so hopefully after it gets felted and blocked the whole thing looks like it should. 

I will take more pictures after this has been felted, I'm hoping that that goes OK.