Quilted knitting needle roll

Ah, the knitting needle roll. What an object of joy forever. First, it’s quilted. Second, it’s therefore soft and squishy and warm. Third, it’s pink. Fourth, it’s full of gorgeous bamboo knitting needles.

I need to meet more people who knit, so I can make more needle rolls and buy more sets of these fantastic bamboo knitting needles.

Anyway: after ordering the 6″ dpns and 9″ spns from eKnittingNeedles, I set out to make this needle roll.

It was an adventure, and I feel that I’m a better person as a result. Firstly, I learned things. Secondly, I made a prototype with very few errors, woop woop!

The first step was to machine-quilt the inner and outer fabrics together. I wanted to stipple them rather than quilt them in lines, and that meant doing free-motion quilting for the first time in my life. I first took about twenty minutes figuring out how to put the free-motion foot on my machine; if it helps you to know, you have to unscrew the whole foot assembly to put it on, not just pop off the sewing foot.

I then took another twenty minutes figuring out how to lower the feed dogs on my machine. Those pesky machine designers–I have to pull off the piece of plastic that forms the sewing bed, to get to it. But I got to it. And I pinned together my quilt sandwich, took a deep breath, and began to stipple.

I’d like to note that stippling isn’t necessarily easy. On the one hand, you have to simulate random motion, which is hard to do. On another hand, you can’t see what’s happening with the fabric behind your needle, which makes it hard to (1) not miss spots entirely, and (2) avoid crossing lines, which is a stippling no-no.

You also have to crank your machine’s tension way up.

In the end I got the pieces quilted together, and though it isn’t a very honorable execution of a stipple, it’s mine and I love it.

I then sewed on the pieces of fabric for pockets, spent twenty minutes finding my disappearing-ink marking pen, marked and sewed the individual pockets, and finally bound the whole thing. My binding technique is one I recently heard of from my mother–it creates a nice double-matting on one side of the piece. On this go-around I used single-fold binding, which was a big mistake, and sewed the pieces of the tape together at 90-degree angles, which was also a big mistake. I’ll know better next time, and my next needle roll will be the better for it.

All in all, though, I’m tickled pink with the result and will treasure it forever. Packaging like this is so appealing… I feel, now that if I decide to go Out West in a covered wagon, or to take a three months’ holiday on the Lido, or if I’m transported to Siberia and have to throw things haphazardly in a suitcase in the middle of the night, my knitting needle situation is taken care of.

Joy.