shopping bag retrospective…

I’m here and I’ve committed myself to making one of those ‘Take an Old Bag Shopping’  thingys, for a hostess gift - the pattern was in Knitwords No 44, back in 2007. https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2009/02/what-every-brother-knitter-should-know.html

A Passap knitter had sent me a bag and the pattern, done on a  Passap machine and you know, I can be honest now, enough time has passed! When it first came in, I remember thinking, what the heck? Who wants to make a shopping bag? They give you plastic bags at the grocery store!  Was I worried about my carbon footprint? Get a life! Remember, it was almost 15 years ago and did I care? Honestly, not really! But seriously, the reality was, I had 48 pages of magazine to fill with knitting stuff! I couldn’t afford to go around being snooty.

Anyway, I did end up translating and writing the pattern for Japanese machines and, back in the day, I made that bag so many times, virtually every one I knew got at least one, probably made it at least twenty times. It is a great hostess gift! But, here I am today, it’s been a while and I’ve read my notes and all the old blogposts about it, gearing myself up for this - there’s not a lot of time for dillydallying- I need to have it ready to go within five days. 

Pulled out my old ‘cheat sheet’ pattern - still have my original bag, looked it over, familiarizing myself with the various details. Went to my machine (Silver electronic standard gauge) and put in a new sponge bar - haven’t knit anything since the end of April and even my aging brain remembers to do this -  https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-elephant-in-room.html

Loaded in the stitch pattern and did some ‘air knitting’ 

to check the pattern and felt I was ready to jump in. 

Now, at the top of my cheat sheet, it says, in block caps, under Handles, LEAVE LONG TAILS…did I do that? No, of course not. The long tails are for sewing up the edges of the handles onto the top hem. Next part is the top hem of the first side - the original pattern calls for a picot hem - did I do that? Hell, no! For some reason that isn’t on my cheat sheet! This is a freakin’ shopping bag! Who needs a picot hem? This will be a ‘boy bag’! Kept going, got ‘er done and it was only when I was attempting to sew up the handles, I noticed the second one was botched - put on backwards! Ah, no one will ever notice! It's a freakin' shopping bag!

Oh my, even with the mistakes, this was fun! Much better than watching the news!