Uzbek Napramach Bag

I had a lot of fun making this bag! I had a whole pile of brightly dyed recycled yarns and I wanted to find a project that would allow me to show them off to their best advantage. I adapted this from a design by Vicki Square, published in the very inspiring book Folk Bags. She called it "Napramach" which is an Uzbek word for a type of bag used to store household supplies. I shortened her design a bit to make it work better as a purse, lined it with a deep purple silky fabric, and added a very neat woven strap.

The lining is stiffened with interfacing to give structure to the bag. This makes for a really lovely combination of textures: The tightly-knit wool/silk yarns on the outside, the stiff interior, and the silky lining.

Handles and straps are one of the weakest points of knitting. Frequently knitted handles stretch way out, are too skinny for comfort or else have a less-than-ideal texture. In my quest to overcome these weaknesses, I've been exploring the technique of card-weaving on an inkle loom. My amazing husband just built me a gorgeous inkle loom for this purpose, and this bag handle was my first card-woven strap.

Card weaving allows for beautifully intricate patterns and produces a very sturdy product in the end.

One other note about this bag: It's made entirely from recycled yarns, and four of the colors (blue, green, yellow and pink - the four in the strap) are a wool/silk blend that I dyed with Easter egg dyes! The red and purple are wool yarns dyed with black cherry and grape Kool Aid respectively. All of them are really great semi-solids that worked beautifully into the colorwork patterns of this bag.

Suggested Retail: $40

The T-yarn Collection: Market Bags

T-shirt yarn makes really excellent heavy-duty market bags. They don't collapse down as small as a cotton yarn or plarn bag, but they're even better suited to hauling around a watermelon or a small pile of pumpkins. The stretch of the t-yarn and the structure of the net bag expand to fit a huge variety of shapes, and the handles feel good in your hands or on your shoulder.

The sturdy construction of these bags starts with a square base, comes up with netting on the sides, and finish with thick rolled handles.

Many of the t-shirts that went into these bags came from my closet, ones that were too old even for Goodwill but were either too-well loved to just throw away or simply had a bit of life left in them. It's a lot like the patchwork quilts of previous generations: making sure to get the last bit of use left from a nearly worn-out piece of fabric.

Currently I have two of these t-yarn market bags available: one in gradient shades from navy to sky blue, and one in greens, grays, and dark purple.

Suggested Retail: $20

The Plarn Collection Blue Rainbow Chullo Purse

A chullo hat is the traditional Peruvian earflap hat worn up in the Andes mountains. This bag was originally designed by Mary Jane Mucklestone, who looked at a chullo earflap and thought, "That would look great blown way up and turned into a purse!" I loved the idea, and adapted it into this colorful plarn purse.

Five colors of plastic bags went into this purse, four of them from newspaper sleeves, with the green from the large-size Goodwill bags. Thanks go to a neighbor and a friend for saving bags for me and helping me collect a full rainbow of color!

The purse closes with a loop and vintage-button closure.

It is fully lined with an upcycled woven cotton shirt, complete with the shirt pocket for storing your wallet or cell phone.

More than almost anything I've knit recently, people have asked me about this bag. Whether I was working on it at the park or at the doctor's waiting room, people have stopped to take a look and then brought their friends over to see what I was working on. It's a real conversation starter when you think about the new uses you can put to seemingly useless materials!

Suggested Retail: $35

The Plarn Collection: Farmer's Market Bag

I love string market bags. They expand to hold large quantities of oddly-shaped purchases, yet collapse down into something you can easily stuff into your purse. They're deceptively strong, and very pretty with their eyelet lace structure. And, of course, re-using your own bag is better stewardship of our resources than using disposable plastic bags. Here's a new take on a traditional string market bag: one made entirely from recycled plastic grocery bags.

This plarn bag appears small before you fill it, but can actually hold a watermelon (our Saturday farmer's market prize from today) or about a dozen ears of corn. Try doing that with a regular flimsy plastic bag and you'll end up with a torn bag and corn on the ground!

The bow is decorative and entirely removable if you want to give this market bag to a man.

Suggested Retail $20