Bag Lady

Like most knitters, I have devoted my life to the quest for the perfect knitting bag.  About every six or eight months, I fall out of love with my current solution and decide there Has To Be a Better Way.  I have tried designer bags, utility bags, fancy-pants bags, no-frills bags, and bagmaster 2000s.  All of therm are both perfect, and totally useless, depending on what I'm trying to stuff into them.  My most recent crusade has been for something that is Big Enough.  By big enough, I mean that I have been experiencing trouble with the size of my projects, relative to the size of my bag.  It turns out that a man's size large top-down raglan turtleneck takes up more room in one's knitting bag than one might think.  It also has a tendency to squish the PB & J you threw in there for lunch, and to obliterate any chance you had of finding/answering your cell phone before it stops ringing. 

I was in denial about this problem for a long time, because I had such high hopes for my current specimen.  The thing cost a fortune: it could be described as a status knitting bag, and I saved up for it for quite a little while, telling myself it would be worth it because this one was finally going to fulfill the quest.  It's a fine vehicle, and sexy, too - non-knitters are always complementing me on it - but I have been asking too much of it.  I realized this when an abrupt stop in the car sent the bag flying off the front seat, vomiting its contents all over my car.  It was open, of course, because the project du jour was too fat to close it.  I snapped (again):  There Has To Be a Better Way.

I carefully researched the options available (again), weighed them against the knitting budget (whose first priority must always be Yarn Procurement), and determined (again) that I was hosed.  The bag I wanted to try not only exceeded my allowance, it's unavailable until its maker catches up a backlog of orders that she noted on her website sometime during the Clinton administration.  And I wasn't sure it was the right answer for me anyway. 

So for the cost of about half of the backordered bag, and one (albeit precious) weekend, I broke down and made this:

It can do this:

And also this:

That is a full-size Peace Fleece cardigan in progress, in there: the biggest thing I had available to try it out with.  The cardi does not have sleeves yet, but there is still gobs of room in there for them, and all the yarn for the whole project, too.  Could probably fit some small children in there as well, while I'm at it.  This thing is Commodious.  It has all the pockets I wanted, in all the right (I think) places - note easy access to cell phone on the right, and business card case on the left.  And the lining is light-colored (silk dupioni, no less - why not?) so I can see all the way to the bottom.  The old-school top dowels keep it stable, and the leather bottom feels nice and looks tough.

Pleased with myself?  Heck Yeah.  Getting curvature of the spine from carrying it much?  Probably.