Thursday, March 08, 2007

Nubbin

Care to guess?






No, it's not a winkie warmer.



A few clues:
  • Lace weight yarn
  • 000 needles
  • Cast on 5 stitches and join
  • Curse quietly
  • Work on the first 8 rows and then rip about 19 times
  • Curse louder
  • Throw out the overworked yarn
  • Tell yourself you're learning humility


It's the miser's purse from the January Piecework.

A miser's purse is a very cool thing. Basically, it's a tube with both ends closed. The opening is a longways slit in the middle. The weight of the coins, combined with two sliding rings, keeps the contents safe.

Really, I did have to rip many, many times over the course of three days. Now that I'm done with the increases, it's working up reasonably quickly, and I was even able to recover from accidentally pulling out one of the needles.

Tomorrow, I'll try to post some photos of period miser's purses, but I thought I would work on this one so that I'd have a work in progress to show for my lecture on Civil War knitting on Wednesday.

Plus it's teaching me humility.

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