Sakura and Stella Market Bags

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! We had some pretty spectacular rain and hail at my house. It's really amazing that we continue to get precipitation this late in the summer! I heard on the news that we are now completely out of our extreme drought that has lasted over 20 years. 

I've continued to work on market bags. I enjoy making them and I think they'll make wonderful gifts! This week I made a Sakura Market Bag designed by K.A.M.E. Crochet:

Sakura Market Bag

Sakura Market Bag - bottom

I really like how this bag turned out! It was easy to make, it's a good size and I think the bottom motif is really pretty. I'll definitely be making more of these as gifts! This was the Jimmy Beans Wool Accessory Club project for June 2022 that I'd been holding on to until I had time to work on it and had some crochet experience.

I also just finished a Stella Market Bag designed by Susy Knotsosquare:

 

Stella Market Bag

Stella Market Bag - bottom

I'm not as fond of the bottom of this bag as I am of some of the others. It's not a pretty, it has larger open spaces that small things could fall through and it doesn't lie flat. The problem with lying flat is probably something that I did, like maybe my chain stitches are too tight compared to my other stitches. I don't know. I made this with some leftover flax yarn that I bought 25 years ago when I first tried to learn to knit. I didn't get very far with the knitting at that time and soon moved on to other things so I lost what little I had learned, but I did make some washcloths out of this yarn. It's a very stiff yarn on the skein so is a bit of work to knit or crochet, but it softens up beautifully with use and washing. It'll be interesting to see how this market bag holds up over time. The bottom motif might even flatten out as the yarn softens. I used up all of my blue and a good part of my red on this bag. I still have some more red and some lavender left. There's not enough for another market bag, but I want to use up this yarn so I'm looking through patterns to see what else I might want to make with it. 

On the knitting side, I finished my Autumn Snow hat designed by Kay F. Jones:

Autumn Snow

I made this hat to use up some of yarn left over from last month's Jimmy Beans Wool Accessory Club project. This was a simple project, but it allowed me to play with knitting "jogless" stripes. When you knit something like a hat in the round, you are actually knitting a spiral rather than individual rounds. If you don't do anything special when you change yarn colors for a stripe, then you will have a little bump or jog in the color at the beginning and end of the stripe. Sorry that I don't have any pictures to illustrate this! There are a couple of techniques that people use to smooth out that transition a bit. I used one of those methods on this hat. I found that it worked well on multiple-round stripes but had problems on single round stripes. Then it dawned on me that knitting an extra stitch in the stripe color before switching back to the other color would fix the problem that I was seeing and wouldn't be a noticeable deviation from the stripe pattern. I tried that on my last stripes and that worked well. Again, sorry that I don't have pictures to illustrate this! Bad Blogger!!

Finally, I started working on Engaged designed by Laura Nelkin:

Engaged

This is the July 2023 project for the Lola's Choice club, Laura's bi-monthly small project club. This project is a cute kerchief knit from a linen yarn. The kit includes an odd-count flat stitch peyote ring that you can slide onto the kerchief for a little added style. I'm knitting the kerchief first, but am looking forward to making the ring since I've never done this before. I really enjoy Laura's club projects because there's always something new and interesting to learn!

Well, that's another week gone by. I'm really enjoying having the time to work on all of these projects, with enough time left over to take care of Lance and still do some clean-up projects around the house! I hope everyone's having a wonderful summer and aren't experiencing too much of the extreme weather!

Nancy