This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home...

....okay so this post has nothing whatsoever to do with piggies, but it was the only clever thing I could come up with having to do with market. :)

Once upon a time, I started working on a market bag. And then I moved to Milwaukee and this project got packed into a bag, and got put into my yarn spare room closet, and I never got around to finishing it...(it's still in the closet, I really should dig that thing out). The other day, I went to dig out a cone of Raspberry Swirls Peaches & Creme, and I found a couple other cones of cotton yarn that I really wanted to use up, one of them being Blue Swirls.

I bought this color a while ago, and it got buried in the same closet after the move, of course...

Anyway, so I've been looking for a good market bag pattern. I like the one that I used with the previous market bag, but the Blue Swirls is a worsted weight, and not a double worsted weight. Plus I have a bunch of market bag patterns in my Ravelry queue, so I figured I should branch out. I settled on the Fantasy Naturale Market Bag pattern from the Plymouth Yarn website.

The pattern initially called for size 10 needles and size 15 needles, but since I was doing this in worsted weight yarn and it does eventually have to hold things, I looked through the projects on Ravelry and decided to make some modifications.

I cast on the bottom of the bag with size 7 needles (pattern calls for straights, but I used a KnitPicks fixed circular). This made a pretty firm fabric for the bottom of the bag. I did the same number of stitches that the pattern called for. I have never picked up stitches before, so when I went to pick them up, I only picked up 98 stitches instead of 100. So I decreased down 2 stitches since the pattern is repeats of 4. I didn't start on the pattern right away, but I "extended" the bottom doing just straight knitting for a while before switching to the bigger needles for the mesh part of the bag.

I switched to size 10 needles, and I used the size 10 from my Denise set. The pattern was easy to memorize, so I did most of the knitting while watching TV.

I didn't change anything else for the rest of the pattern, except since I only had 96 stitches instead of 100, I had to adjust the knitting at the end a bit. For Round 5, I changed it to: Knit 29, Bind Off 14, Knit 34, Bind Off 15 and Knit 5. That was the only adjustment I made for the end, I still re-cast on 20 stitches for the handle.

I really like this pattern, and I may knit more of it. However, there are so many market bag patterns and so little time, we'll see if I get back to doing this one! I think this will end up being a Mother's Day present for my mom so she can take it to farmer's markets this summer, but we'll see. ;)

Incidentally, I had this market bag in my Ravelry queue since 9/20/2008, so it officially counts as a project from my queue! That marks queue project #4 in as many months of 2010, so I should have no problem finishing 10 queue projects by the end of 2010. Hooray!