Maui Market Bag Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! This week I spent most of my time finishing my Maui Market Bag designed by Susan E. Kennedy:

Maui Market Bag

I really like the pattern for this bag. It has a lot of details that give it a professional look and I think it will be strong and very useful. The one thing that I will change the next time I make one of this will be to increase the repeats in the body of the bag to make the bag a little taller. There was one frustration that I had when making this bag and that was how much the yarn was splitting, especially the lighter yellow yarn. The hook kept getting caught on pieces of the yarn in other parts of the stitch, causing me to have to remake the stitches. This happened a LOT and probably doubled the time for making this bag until I got a new crochet hook with a slightly differently shaped hook and that made things a LOT better. Here are the two hooks for comparison (sorry I couldn't get the camera to focus completely, but I think you still get the idea):

crochet hook comparison

The green hook was the original hook and the pink hook is the new hook. I think you can see that the new hook has a sharper and slightly deeper hook and that really worked well with this yarn. A good lesson to me that I probably need to try multiple types of hooks to see which hooks work for me with which yarns!

To give myself a little relief from the difficulties of working with the yarn for the market bag, I decided to pick up some old, easy knitting projects that have been sitting around for a while. The first project I picked up is the Prismatic Poncho designed by Rachel Roden. This was a Jimmy Beans Wool Knitting Club project from way back in 2019. I've been thinking about this project for a while now since I think the poncho will be perfect in the winter when I'm knitting or crocheting or whatever and I need a little more warmth on my arms. This poncho is constructed by knitting two long rectangles and then seaming them together into the poncho shape. I had already finished the first rectangle:

Prismatic Poncho - first half

Here's my progress so far on the second half:

Prismatic Poncho - second half

I'm having trouble with the edging being a bit tight and pulling in on the fabric, but I think that'll be fine since I won't be wearing this as a fashion statement, but instead will wear it for warmth. The yarn is really soft so I think this will be yummy to wear!

I also started an old Jimmy Beans Wool Accessory Club project. This is the Kerchief-errific cowl designed by Amy Gunderson:

Kerchief-errific

This cowl is using the same yarn as the poncho, so it is knitting up really soft! The pattern is written in a bit of a confusing fashion, but I think I have figured out what I'm supposed to be doing. One of the confusions in the pattern is that it says to repeat the "plain rows" twice, but the way the knitting chart is numbered it looks like every row should be knit twice, so that's what I'm doing. I'll know I was wrong if I run out of yarn! But it's going well so far.

That's all I have for this time. My best to everyone!

Nancy