Here is the fifth gift from our secret birthday gift swap, and it was made by Sheila and given to Maureen. It is cool that it worked out so that Maureen and Sheila were each other's secret gifters.

This was Sheila's first felting project, and it turned out to be really cute. The pattern is from Felted Knits. She had a bit of an adventure though. Here is her story:

"The pocket saga . . . I thought that the yarn I used for the pocket was the same as the yarn for the rest of the purse. I had used it for a teddy bear sweater and it was fine. However, when I went to felt the bag, the main part of it felted great, but the pocket didn't seem to felt at all. I gave it more time (hence the smaller size of the bag) but nothing. When I took it out of the machine, my cute bag had this big wet mess of yarn hanging off it. I had to cut the pocket off and make a new one. I felted it by hand in my sink and it looked okay. Problem two . . . it was really hard to sew it all the way around after it was felted. I went out and bought a metal thimble, but there was no way. The woman in JoAnn's suggested that I try liquid stitches so I did. As far as I know the pocket is still on the bag!"

The group decided that for 2008 we would do a secret holiday gift swap instead of birthday. That will give all of us an equal amount of time, and almost an entire year to create something special.