To Market

When I first knit this market bag, I couldn’t help humming the old nursery rhyme over and over: To market, to market, to buy a fat pig… You know the one. It turns out the rhyme is even older than I thought. If my quick research is correct, the first written recording of the rhyme was made in 1598 by John Florio in his volume, “A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English.”

Knitting begins with a provisional cast on. The base is worked back and forth, then stitches are picked up, and knitting continues in the round. At the top, most of the stitches are bound off, and then the handle is knit. The final handle stitches are joined to the other side with a 3-needle bind off. If desired, bags could be lined with fabric. Lining instructions not included. What is included, however, is a complete instruction set for all three sizes of bag, from the small one, which, if lined, would make an awesome project bag, to the largest that will hold copious amounts of whatever you put in it.

If you were wondering, yes, the same eight beautiful, and delicious (I ate them all!) Washington apples are shown in each bag, so that you can see the relative size difference between the bags.

• Yarn: Sport weight linen 150 [250, 375] yards.
• Model: Claudia Hand Painted Yarns Linen: small in Turquoise, medium in Citrus, and large in River Bank Grass; 270 yards in 100 grams; 100% linen.
• Needles: US 7 and 3 (4.5 and 3.25 mm).
• Gauge: 21 sts and 30 rows to 4 inches (10 cm) in st st with smaller needles.
• Finished size width at top x height, empty, relaxed, without handle: 9.5 x 11.5 [11.5 x 13.5, 13.5 x 16.5] inches.
• Stitch instructions: Charted and written.