Pattern: Archaeopteryx Felted Messenger Bag

A couple of months ago I took part in an endangered & extinct species themed swap with the Geek & Nerd Swap group on ravelry. I couldn't get the idea of knitting a bag with an Archaeopteryx fossil on it out of my head... But for some reason, knitting patterns for Archaeopteryx bags seem to be hard to find (and for some reason my husband was surprised to find me surprised at that discovery...) - so I decided to come up with my own design.

I wanted a nice size messenger style bag, sturdy enough to hold a book or two, I had recently discovered the fun in knit-felting, and I figured the easiest way to get that fossil on the bag would be duplicate stitching it on. So with all those parameters decided, I started calculating stitch and row counts to get the size of bag I wanted, taking into account about 30% of shrinkage in the felting process, charted the fossil design, knit, knit, and knit again, seamed, duplicate stitched and tried to keep calm while the bag was felting in my washing machine. This is what I ended up with:

I couldn't have been happier with the result!

As I've mentioned, I made this for a swap, so I knew I wouldn't keep the bag - but I wanted to be able to make another one for myself one fine day (that hopefully comes soon), so I took lots of notes. Now, I finally decided to turn those notes into something like a pattern. It's available for free on ravelry: Archaeoptery Bag pattern.