Tutorial: knitting bag

I love fall. In the past couple weeks, summer finally seems to be giving up around here. I have been soaking up the cooler temperatures and nice breezes, and have even noticed a few yellow leaves falling from the trees in our yard.
The cooler temperatures lately have really made me want to knit. So I have been knitting away (more on that to come next week) and I have been wanting a new knitting bag. At about the same time I decided I needed a new bag.

I am not naturally drawn to fall colors. Orange and red aren’t my thing, so I thought about my favorite fall colors. Mustard yellow, teal, brown. They aren’t first-thing-to-your-mind fall colors, but they are rich and warm and cozy.

After all the chatter, let’s get to the project, shall we?

My new knitting bag. My yarn embroidered knitting bag. I am pretty excited about this one.

To make it, you only need a few inexpensive things:

a canvas bag (not pictured – mine is 17.5″W x 13″H x 4″D from JoAnn)
yarn
tapestry needle (I used size 20)
pencil/paper (optional)

I started by tracing a circle (for the ball of yarn) onto my bag with a pencil. You could free hand a drawing of course, but I can’t draw a circle without drawing an oval.

After I traced the circle, I just kind of filled in with the yarn lines. I didn’t use a pattern and just added in lines here and there. You will want to make sure you don’t draw an intricate or closely spaced design since the yarn is so thick and not great for detail.

After I had my “pattern” drawn, I stitched it using a back stitch. You will want to use short lengths of yarn (about 12 inches) because the yarn gets fuzzy as it passes back and forth through the canvas. If you use a peice much bigger than 12 inches, it gets way too fuzzy and doesn’t look so great.

I also added 3 simple lines of running stitch at the top border of the bag.

My favorite part is that you can see the running stitches inside the bag. Sweet.

It is already filled up with a knitting project, tools of the trade, and a gum wrapper and receipt from knitting night yesterday. It has been broken in!

Happy fall, happy knitting, happy warm and cozy colors.