May 25th, 2007
Market bag madness
Last year, my friend Gina knit a market bag from a free pattern she found online. (She even used the yarn called for in the pattern!) It turned out great, and she has since knit a few more.
At the beginning of this month, I got the market-bag itch myself and proceeded to crank out three of these suckers in quick succession, making some slight modifications to the original pattern. The first one, knit in four different colors of leftover dishcloth cotton, ended up with handles that were far too long for my liking. The original pattern called for 20-stitch-long handles. Gina did this on her first bag, and I thought the handles were a bit short. So I decided to extend them…a lot. In a burst of overzealous handle-making I cast on one hundred stitches for each handle. The result doesn’t work for me…but turned out to be just right for Katie, to whom I gave the bag (though I left the ends for her to weave in).
The second bag I made, the green one on the right here, was knit in Shine Worsted; the third bag, knit from dishcloth cotton, is slightly shorter because I was experimenting with length in an effort to find the right balance between “big enough to be useful at the farmers’ market” and “not so big that it bounces off my butt when I walk.” Both of these are planned as gifts for swap partners.
This is a great pattern and one that’s extremely easy to remember. Somewhere between one and a half and two balls of dishcloth cotton is what you’ll need for this, so it’s by no means an expensive project. And the best part is there’s no seaming, grafting, Kitchener stitching, or whatever (though you do have to pick up some stitches around the flat base…).
I still look at those and think they would make excellent tanks (over a solid top).
I’ll have to check out those market bags!! Thanks for the birthday wish for my mom on my blog :)
[…] I was in market-bag-knitting-mode in May, I gave one of the bags I made to my friend Katie. The handles were too long for my liking […]