And the hatred begins early. Hate the circular needles, am annoyed by the splitty yarn, and aggravated by the stockinette stitch bottom which is taking for freaking ever.

I discovered, once I was most of the way through the stockinette stitch portion, that part of the reason this has been so difficult to knit is that I’ve been using the wrong needles with the fiber. Since this is mostly acrylic, I should be using metal needles, not bamboo.

This is like the bag from hell. So here I am, part way through picking up stitches to join the bottom of the bag and make it a round shape, when my needles break. They are cheap bamboo ones from China, and the plastic circular part completely separates from the bamboo. This, naturally, means that I have to go back and pick up a ton of dropped stitches. I do that, then I carefully pull apart the yarn at the place where the needle broke and go get my glue to repair it. But I can’t find the super glue, which is my preferred method as it glues instantly. I grab the Elmer’s, and carefully glue the sucker. I get a tiny bit of glue on the yarn, but at this point I’m so mad at it that I really don’t care, and just wipe it off. A half-hour later, I come back to discover that my yarn is glued to the needles. Ugh.

After detaching the yarn from the needles with a pen, I then finish picking up stitches. This is when I discover that the circular needles I am using have too long of a cord, which means they are pulling the stitches horribly and I can barely stretch it to fit, let alone knit with it. The sad thing is while I have another set of size 6 needles with a shorter cord, unfortunately they are a different mm size. Yes, you heard me. The ones I’m currently knitting with are 4.0 mm, but the ones that I need to knit with because of the shorter cord are 4.25 mm. Argh! I hate this project anyways at this point, so I decide to go up a quarter of a mm so that the knitting insanity can continue.

This bag will never end. I swear, the yarn-overs and k2togs are endless. Oh, and at one point I realized that somehow I had like 300 stitches because I’d forgotten to k2tog for an entire round, so I had to k2tog for the next round that was supposed to be a regular knitting round, and now there’s a section near the bottom that is doubled and weird. Cie la vie! At this point I really don’t care.

Ok, so the project got better as I went along. I started using a shorter set of circs that worked better and except for the horribly splitty nature of the yarn, it wasn’t that bad. The pattern itself is well-written, I just chose crap an therefore am producing crap. I also, because of the splitty yarn, found myself increasing and decreasing my stitches like whoa. I have about 140 right now, but I really can’t be sure because it fluctuates. I’m getting close to the end. I can taste it and I find that very exciting.

Using the size 4 dpns awkwardly graciously let me borrow, I have knit a two-inch ribbing opening band instead of a one-inch band, in part because I do not understand the directions for the handle and am therefore avoiding doing it. I seriously cannot visualize this at all. It makes absolutely no sense. Magically, however, I am only one stitch bigger than what the original pattern calls for (137 instead of 136).

I discovered the reason that the pattern wasn’t making sense was because I was missing the third page of the pattern. Duh. I sorta suspected that. Anyways, am now using the remainder of yarn to make the strap. Yey. Finally I will finish this damn thing.

I had to turn the bag inside-out before I could do the three-needle bind off, or there would have been a nasty seam sticking out. This bind off, by the way, was super easy and fun and the yarn didin’t split into 8 separate plies too much, which was a relief.

Conclusion: The bag pattern is fine. It’s great, actually. It’s a nice bag and I love the short, wide handle, the roominess of the mesh portion, the cool stockinette bottom, etc. The yarn was like death. Never again will I knit with inferior yarn. I have learned my lesson.

P.S. - The portrait of the woman in the first photo is my great-great-grandmother - also a Sarah!