You can use any sturdy worsted weight yarn.

The colorways for this shoulder bag are borrowed from cloak designs from ancient villages in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, each with its own distinctive pattern. The Ait Haddidou people live in the High Atlas Mountains of North Africa, and one of their patterns is used in this piece.

The beauty of the traditional striped designs, from a knitter’s perspective, is that you never have to carry the yarn behind the work over more than two stitches, making this a good pattern for first-time stranded knitting. If you are new to color knitting, you might choose to skip the tattoo motif and knit only the striped sequence.

The design at the very top is (what I believe to be)the Arabic for Blessing or Blessed (short version), barak, similar to Hebrew bracha.