Ouf.
There is a folder on my laptop called "working folder". It's where I throw photos destined for my blogs before I upload them, so I can do the usual cropping, level adjustments, and whatnot.
Usually I am taking photos only two or three blog posts ahead. When I am on a roll, like I was at the beginning of the year, I will take photos, upload them, and then have the blog all ready and scheduled weeks and advance.
And then, you know, things happen, and it all falls apart again.
These soap sacks were made for Cheshin for her birthday, which was last spring, which gives you an idea of how far behind I've got. I found some interesting soaps at a local shop and decided to include them as part of her birthday present, but they were minimally packaged with just a cardboard band around the soap. Minimal packaging is all well and good, but it might not survive being mailed to Ottawa and it might not be very protective of the soaps if they aren't used right away.
So I went on Ravelry, where all fun small patterns are catalogued, and found this soap sack pattern. There are lots of different patterns for soap sacks on the net, but I liked this one because it is reusable; most patterns have you sew the soap into the sack and are thus for one-time use.
Besides having the benefit of being free as in beer, the soap sacks feature my favourite "sandwich baggy" closure for pillows and, um, soap — no fussing with knots or drawstrings. The only mod was to change the garter stitch heart motif to a more-practical-for-scrubbing diamond.
I used up an entire ball of mystery yarn from the stash (definitely cotton, but beyond that, no clue). Cotton seemed like a logical choice since it's what gets used most often for handmade washcloths, but Cheshin gave me a bar of soap for my birthday which is entirely enclosed in felted wool, the idea being it will get more felted and therefore more scrubby in the shower. I'm still working through a big bottle of shower gel, but I think the felted soap will be up next.
Because of course showers is where fun experiments happen. Isn't it?