These are the adorable stitch markers I got from Jenn. The little candy beads are
so cute! I love the bright colors, and the little tin they came in!

These are the stitch markers I got from Adriane. They are so sweet!
I love the little flowers on them, they are very "girly" which is usually the
mood I'm in when I use decorative stitch markers. I love them!

This is my Perfect Knitting Bag in progress. What does it take to design a pattern from scratch?

Well...it takes a very large needle for knitting the wool open enough to have room to felt.

It takes swatches that were measured pre- and post-felting so you can calculate the rate of shrinkage.

It would normally also take the careful notation of how many rows/stitches your swatches were, if you hadn't begun this bag 2 years ago and lost the scrap of paper those notes were on.

It takes a $hitlo@d of wool to make a very large bag, which is rediculously large pre-felting. It takes a row counter and enough skill to know when you've clicked it, and how you miraculously wound up with 10 extra body rows.

It takes graph paper to chart out incs and decs, and a pad of sketch paper to keep track of your design notes, especially when you change your mind half-way through. It also takes a much larger bag to shlep it all around in.

P.S. All you can see here is a lousy pic of the unworked side of the bag. I'm not going to give away a pattern before I shop it around! :)