this over-stuffed doll-stroller basket is in fact a lacy crochet hat that never stayed on my toddler girl's head for longer than 1 minute
Yesterday, I wrote about the imperfections inherent in handmaking. Today I'm going to confess that some of my projects which turned out perfect esthetically, also turned out perfectly unfunctional, and didn't work. Or, rather, they did work, but not in the way I'd conceived them.
Take the hanging laundry bag I made for my traveling boys some years back. A brilliant (I thought) solution to my boys' laundry while away, created from a heirloom pattern, with an embroidered sashiko-style design inspired by some of my boys drawings: perfect, basically, in every possible way. Except that, it turned out, my boys didn't have any use for a laundry bag while traveling for tennis tournaments: laundry facilities were not available, so their coach gave them a bar of soap, and instructed them to hand-wash their clothes daily (and every year, I'm surprised happy to report, their clothes come back amazingly clean: this goes to show how kids can make virtue of necessity ...).
So our hanging laundry bag stopped traveling after that first year, and instead got hung in the bathroom, where it serves as a collector of unpaired socks: because, for some inexplicable reason, socks worn in pairs often come out of our washing machine as a single sock. It's one of those maddening mysteries, to which I found a temporary solution by turning the laundry bag into a limbo bag for lonely socks. This bag has been hanging from our bathroom door every since, and because occasionally one of the missing socks does turn up and is happily reunited with its lone companion, the bag is indeed very functional ... as a single-sock limbo bag.
PS if you need a travel hanging laundry bag, or a single-sock limbo bag, or an everywhere handwork bag, see my tutorial here!
