The pattern is the Ilene Market Bag by Hannah Ingalls, free to download from her blog, iknityouknot. It's a stretchy, single strap market bag that is knit from the bottom up. While the bottom is knit flat, stitches are picked up from around the sides of the base and it is knit in a circle up to the top of the bag before going back to flat knitting for the strap.
The bottom and the first several rows of the bag are knit in a fairly solid stitch. The bag is knit in an airy stitch that seems to twist as you go forward.
I used Pittsburgh Construction twine in orange and hot pink. The colors were reversed from the picture for the first bag. Compared to yarn, twine is inert. The strand doesn't stretch along its length but it sure stretched out more than I anticipated due to the larger needles and the loose stitch.
Benchmark moments in life -- a new baby, retirement, moving into a new home -- deserve to be marked with something handmade, I believe. Most knitters -- myself definitely -- live in fantasy time where you believe that you can just whip something out in a timely way.
By the time this bag was finished and given, the couple had moved out of the apartment it was supposed to warm and into a house.
Their next housewarming gift will be sewn rather than knit, I think.
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