Knitting Tuesday: The Knitted Bag

I love love bags. They are easily one of my favourite accessories and I cannot get enough of them. I love anything from a cute clutch to a huge carry all bag. I love reusable grocery bags and I love everything in between. There are not many things in life I would limit myself to buying. I am sure you all have yours and please tell me you do because then I don't feel like I am the only one. But bags, yup that's one thing I really try to limit myself from buying.

Now that I have started knitting however, I always find myself looking for "project bags". I try to use old purses but they don't fit into what I want to use that day so I leave those to my bigger projects. I go to my reusable bag stash but then I realize I need it for groceries and I didn't want to dump everything out. So then I thought to myself, what if I made my own bag. So off  I went to scour Ravelry. So many options but I decided on doing a variation of the Ilene Bag. So here's how I did it! :D

Materials:

1 skein of Cascade Ultra Pima
1 4 mm 16 inch circular
4 stitch markers
1 cable needle or stitch holder
2 4 mm double pointed needles

CO 40 stitches and work back and forth for 25 lines.
BO on rectangle.
Once bound off, use needles and pick up 25 stitches on the short side PM 40 on the long side PM pick up 25 stitches from short side PM then 40 stitches on long side PM. Be sure to keep it in the round.

A great video I found on youtube by +Knit Picks
Picking up stitches

Row 1- knit 25 PM knit 40 PM knit 25 PM knit 40 PM
Row 2- yo/k2tog until it makes 25 stitches PM yo/k2tog until it makes 40 PM yo/k2tog until it makes 25 stitches PM yo/k2tog until it makes 40 PM

Repeat until row 43

Row 44-50 Knit/purl

Row 51 BO 39 stitches. Place 26 stitches onto cable needled BO 39 stitches. Knit 26. Continue to knit 26 stitches back and forth into stockinette stitch. Make sure to have enough for 3 needle bind off.

3 needle bind off with the 26 stitches in the stitch holder.

3 Needle Bind Off

My end result?

It makes a great little project bag! Will have to experiment with more yarn and see if I can make it bigger!

If you were to make this bag, what would you use it for?