Success or not?

I'm a perfectionist. If you don't plan on doing it right, don't do it at all. That's basically how I operate. No wonder I'm a stress case.

But when it comes to knitting, felting your knit goods means you have to throw a bit of caution to the wind and just hope it all turns out. Not something I'm used to doing, but the felting process has some really good upsides - you can be a bit sloppy since it all becomes one smooth fabric.

Before I felted the Canteen bag, both the front and back pieces (rust and red) were exactly the same size, and of course were the same number of rounds and stitches. Somehow, though, the back ended up shrinking waaay more than the front. I haven't decided how much that bothers me.


Front of Canteen bag
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Flap up view
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Back view
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I have two theories about why this happened. Theory Number One - when knitting the side (green), you simultaneously join the front and back pieces to it by picking up stitches and knitting them together with the side. I think that something in this process contributed to the back side being more tightly felted together with the side. You can sorta see that there's a bigger ridge on the back side where they meet, as opposed to the front.

Theory Number Two - since I used two different colors for the front and back, perhaps the red just shrinks more than the orange? I'd be interested to know what would happen if I tried this again using the same color for front and back.

Specs: Canteen bag knit with Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Bulky, colors Loden Leaf, Medieval Red, and Rust (1 skein each); needles US #11 (Clover bamboo); gauge 3 sts/inch