The Ultimate Market Bag

Pattern available on Ravelry.

This design has been gathering dust for six years. Literally. Six. YEARS. O.O Possibly even longer than that, but Ravelry tells me that I started my prototype in September of 2012. It was an extra large size and took more than one cone of yarn, which was the original purpose: to create the strongest bag I could by using a single strand of yarn with no seaming or joining to cause weak spots. I wanted this thing to be TOUGH! And boy is it ever!

I've been toting groceries (and other things) around in that extra large bag for six years now and although it's definitely stretched a little taller, ha ha, it has held up to as many canned goods as I can carry and more - like when I put it on the back of the stroller for the half mile walk to the grocery store here in Williamsburg and then I can't even lift it up off of there when we get back home!

Now WHY this pattern has been gathering dust for so long is truly beyond me. It was all but written already. I just needed to clean it up, add some chatty details, make a new chart, and take some photos. Oh and finish the bags. Ooops. Yeah, those have been gathering dust, too!

I started all three of these bags around the same time and worked them simultaneously so that I could take pictures at some of the earlier stages to illustrate the size differences. Like this one that was taken on January 11th of 2013. 2013!

I'm not sure at what point I stopped working on these, but I know for sure that they moved with us from Colorado (where they were begun) to Alabama to Texas to Virginia, where they were all three made up to the last couple rounds before the handles began when I dug them out of the box. That's all I had to do! The handles!

Now, it's true that my hands (more specifically, my old lady joints) wear out pretty quickly working dense stitches like these anymore. I can only do about 30 minutes at a time now. So that can be frustrating when I just want to get them DONE. So I can move on to more relaxing crocheting, like a nice easy scarf or even a cowl. But I get comments on this bag almost every time I'm out with it and so it was high time to put the pattern out there for all the folks who want the ULTIMATE market bag, too!

And what better day to do that than on Earth Day!? Yes, it's true, these bags are pretty much the opposite of the color green, two of them being RED. But I made a green one once and it was just sort of boring! So I wanted to do these in a fun, bright color. Well, except for the middle one, which is in a nice off white sort of color, which I also like. I also did a bright white sparkly one that was lovely for the holidays, but it lives in Australia now!