Steven weighs in...

Steve, who is out of college for the summer, and frequently home, saw the finished evening bag sitting on the kitchen counter and asked about it. 

Steven can be painfully honest at times, and our budding scientist's opinions are quite interesting.  For instance, I get embarrassed about clutter.  Other people's kitchens aren't cluttered with knitting, not are their kitchen tables cluttered with computer parts, but Steven is quite mellow about his parents endless mess.  He says it's a natural survival adaptation to keep all kinds of junk that could be useful later, especially considering that for most of human history, most people struggled to acquire even basic possessions.

Steve wouldn't flatter me about any of my knitted projects.  After taking a good look at the evening bag, he remarked, "Mom, if you would beef that up, you could sell a ton of purses to girls my age."

Really?  I had to ask what "beef that up" meant, and he said, use a metal clasp instead of a loop and button, and put a heavier strap on it, too.  He said that girls are carrying purses with handles made of leather threaded through a chain.

He's certainly right about the hardware trend in purses.  It seems like in the past few years, all the purses are clanky with chunky hardware.

I really have no desire to make them to sell - the project is Entrelac and takes a while.  I simply intended to come up with a great gift pattern.  However, I'd love to make my items more trendy and desirable. With that in mind, I'll just have to see what kind of purse hardware I can find in the craft stores for my next bag project.

This morning, though, the guys are off at a car collector's swap meet, and I worked resolutely on slippers, reviewing my older patterns to see how I'll build a slipper book, knitting a sample pair, and double-checking gauges.  I want to include an old mocassin-style slipper that I came up with for my very first machine that I've never published, and I have a nifty improvement in mind for that slipper.