Tarot Card Box "recipe"

I posted some pictures of my Tarot Card box/pouch last night late, but the computer entirely ate the information that I had typed in about how it was made. This isn’t a pattern, per se, because I worked for lengths rather than for numbers of stitches or rows.

I started with making and felting a swatch. Thanks so much to all who suggested this, especially the person who told me to mark stitches at set distances with cotton thread! It really allowed me to see what my shrinkage would be like. It was MUCH more in the height-wise direction, than in the width. The width shrunk up less than a quarter, but the height shrunk up to about half its size. My original knitted item looked waaay out of proportion, tall and skinny, but it behaved beautifully in the felting and turned out exactly the shape I had wanted.

The yarn in this is a wool/mohair/movil (?) blend that I got from my Grandma’s stash. The brand on it is “Fairknit” and the line is called Cha-cha. Ironically, it’s nothing like the eyelash yarn of the same name, but it looks like somebody stole the label, because it’s in the same type font!

I worked the entire thing on #10 DPN’s. I cast on 15 stitches, which is what I had figured I needed to make it about 5″ across (4″ after felting) on my size 10 needles. I worked it in a rectangle in stockinette stitch until I had the size I wanted for the bottom – I made it about 2.5″, so that it would shrink to be about 1.25″. Then I picked up stitches around three sides and worked stockinette in the round until the bag was 10″ tall (which really looked ridiculous; I wish I had taken “before” pictures!) and then did a 3-stitch I-cord bindoff on three of the needles, leaving one long side working. I continued knitting on the fourth needle back and forth until it was just a shade taller than the bottom (so that the top would flap over the body without being too tight,) and then picked up stitches on three sides of the top and worked the sides of the top flap until they were tall enough (about 2.5″). I did a buttonhole in the fabric (my first!) by binding off 7 stitches in the center on one row, and casting them back on the next row. When the top was finished, I did a 3-stitch I-cord bind off, and it was done. It took about 15 minutes worth of agitation to get it shrunk up just right, and I blocked it over a cling-wrapped box from the pantry.

One thing that I’ll do differently on the next one, is to break the yarn at the end of the top flap and start picking up from one of the corners; this time, I just worked around one corner and back, and although the amount of difference that one extra row makes after felting is miniscule, I still think it would have been a shade better balanced. I like being able to make things out of one continuous string, but I want them to be as balanced as possible.