The photo here on the left and below is the larger black bag in the making. I used Malabrigo's Rasta yarn for the stripes on the outside. I LOVE that stuff, it just melts so easily into the felt. I've used it on merino, merino, silk 50/50 blends and on corriedale. I buy it online from a great yarn shop in San Francisco called Imagiknit, they always seem to have it in stock.
First I laid down four layers of the dark pink part of the way down the template, wrapped it in plastic and then did four layers of the black. The template was 14" tall and 13" wide, the finished piece was 8 1/2" tall and 7" across; that's a good amount of shrinkage.
I use this size for larger knitting projects, in the top picture there are two skeins of yarn and the back of a sweater inside.
This photo on the left is the small bag that I usually use for sock projects. It's hard to tell here because it's wet but the outside layer is dark purple merino, the top layer is chartreuse merino and around it is some beautiful homespun art yarn. I used an old washing soap bottle to help form the bottom of this one. It was made the same as the big one. To stabilize these while they are drying I put the bottle in the small one and stuffed the big one with bubble wrap. This helps the vessel keep it's shape during drying and once dry it will keep that form. The small vessel in the top picture has a 440 yard ball of yarn inside and a partially completed sock.
Both of these have inner pockets to hold your knitting needles and there is another pocket in the larger one to hold a measuring tape, scissors, or whatever you need. They were so fun to make I think I'll do a few more! I love coming up with new ways to mix colors & decorate them. I want to do some machine free motion stitching on them too but those will probably be for me, it's so time consuming I don't think I could get a reasonable price for them. You can find them on my Etsy shop called ifeltlikeitbyterry.
