Attempting Felting

Jumping in feet first I am copying poor Mary Elizabeth yet again. I think I may have mentioned that after seeing her beautiful felted basket at our November meeting I begged her to give us a workshop on how to make them. She very kindly agreed, has been working on instructions, scheduling times that we're all available, working methodically to help us succeed at our first attempt at felting.

Ya, that doesn't seem to really work for me. I am so sorry ME but I tend to just sort of jump in and see where my experimenting takes me.

Tuesday we had our January get together at Judy's. I arrived late and was just in time to overhear the tail end of ME's explanation of how she's going to move forward with us. When I got home I decided that this whole felting thing sounded like fun and I was ready to get started. Now. Rather than bug Mary Elizabeth for the instructions I commenced in typical fashion:

I ran in to the wool store, grabbed the nearest book with felting patterns, got a vague idea of how much wool I was going to need and started shopping.

When I got home I looked at this free online pattern by Alice Thelma and decided I wanted my bowl to be a bit bigger so I grabbed the largest circular double pointed needle I could find in my collection (6.5mm) and cast on about 100 stitches.










I think (hope) my bowl is just about deep enough and I'm ready to start decreasing. Time to look through my collection for double pointed needles. Isn't this an elegant way of storing all the needles my grandmother, my mother, and I have purchased over the years?





How old is this set of #14s and which one of us was crazy enough to knit with them?








Time to switch needles, go back to that online pattern for guidance and start casting off. Wish me luck!
My next project had better be a better storage system for those needles. Any suggestions?
Although, I think I'm pretty sure I purchased too much wool for this bowl so I'll still be able to do Mary Elizabeth's workshop with the rest of the group. Yeah, best of both worlds! I get to experiment now and learn the right way of doing this technique that is new to me in a little while.