Finished a New Celtic Tote!

Over the Christmas break my brother's fiancee admired the Celtic Tote bag I'd made. I asked if she'd like me to make her one and she said she'd love that, her only requirement was no brown.
Okay, with those provisos in place, I embarked on the project!
In the end, wasn't as straight forward as I'd hoped. The yarn I bought didn't come in very interesting colour ranges and I couldn't find a contrast yarn that I really liked. So I had to do some thinking.

I ended up using the blue and knitting the first side. Wasn't coming out as big as the first one but didn't worry about that too much. My big problem was trying to come up with a contrast colour I liked because I wanted to make one of the cables a feature, doing it entirely in the contrast colour.

In the end I pulled something out of my stash. I had some spun and dyed corriedale wool that would felt nicely and I thought the colours were lively enough to be eyecatching.

So, when I began the second side, they became the feature cable!

But I was still really unhappy with the colour and finally decided the only thing would be to dye the whole thing! Decided on red since it really made the contrast yarn pop but my first attempt wasn't very successful because I didn't have a whole packet. It came out a sort of wishy-washy purply-colour.

So I decided to let it dry, press the pieces and sew them all together and dye them like that since I had to wait until I could buy more dye! But the bag did look lovely all sewn together.

Finally I got the dye and once that was done I threw it into the washing machine and felted the daylights out of it! I knew it was going to come out much smaller than the first one but I was a little concerned with just how small it came out.

But still a very usable size, much more like a handbag. So I got the lining material I'd bought (which now the bag had been dyed went with it much better than it had before!) sewed it all up, attached the button and Viola! A very beautiful little Celtic Tote!

I'm very happy with the end result, especially the colour! The feature cable was horribly fiddly to knit and although I'll never do it again! I think it really makes the bag its own individual and extra special. Now all I have to do is get it to recipient. That could take a while too :)
Hope you like this. Happy Knitting :)