Hemp Produce Bag

As part of my ongoing effort to catch up on posting finished projects, here's one I finished just a couple of hours ago.

One of my friends recently came back from a trip to BC with a couple of skeins of Allhemp3 for me to play with. I decided to use one for a prezzie for her and to keep the other for my own selfish uses.


Since one skein of Allhemp3 isn't a whole heck of a lot of yardage, I tried to find some smallish useful projects for it. There were a couple of contenders (like nubbly exfoliating washcloths) but I decided to go for a mesh produce bag (free on Ravelry), instead. I made one of these a long time ago, using leftover cotton yarn, and knew it would be quick and simple (and a good palate-cleanser for me, between projects.)

I made it most of the way through the mesh part before I ran out of the red yarn. Luckily I had some orange Allhemp3 in my stash, left over from some older projects. I finished the mesh and did the handle in orange. I think the two-colour bag is pretty cute, in the end. I gave it a wash and hung it to dry, to soften the stiff hemp a little, but a bit of use and some more washing/drying will leave it as soft as it is durable.

On Infidelity

Before knitting took over my life, I used to have a lot of hobbies -- I used to read a lot more, and you know, even leave the house from time to time. I also spent a lot of time and money on a lot of different crafts: I embroidered and cross-stitched and made Japanese temari balls and sewed a lot of clothes and tried out paper quilling... You name it, I tried it. One thing that I never really took to was crochet.

It's not that I have an inherent bias against crochet -- okay, yeah, I do. It's not stretchy like knitting, which I find is usually a detriment. There are occasions where the stability would be preferable (if you don't see what I mean, just try to knit a corset) but generally I like my projects to have a little give. That, and I've never really learned it beyond the very basics.

So what happened to me, lately? I seem to have caught a crochet bug this week.


I have been sitting on lots of leftover sock yarn (as I'm sure every sock knitter does) and trying to decide what to do with it. I looked at a lot of little projects and various sock blankets on Ravelry, but for some reason the one that really appealed to me was little crocheted hexagons. Maybe it's the hexagon thing: after all, I am only making thousands of them for a quilt -- what's a few hundred more?

I began with a few from some of the leftover orange and brown yarn from the Fisherman socks.


Then I pulled out some leftover Koigu from my Lindsay socks.

I think I like them. I will continue making them, anyway. They are such a quick little thing (maybe 5 minutes a piece?) that it's easy to squeeze one in, if I don't have time for a repeat or two of knitting.


Then I found a really cute pattern for square shell coasters. Since I was already crocheting the hexagons, why not try this on some leftover hemp yarn I had? It is a little sloppy because of my uneven tension (I finally figured out how to tension the yarn without getting finger cramps -- on the next-to-last round) but I think it's still pretty cute. It's a bit big for a coaster, maybe, at about 5ish inches across, but works well for my big mug of iced coffee, this afternoon. Maybe with a little practice, they will even out enough to use them as gifts for someone, sometime.

Or maybe I'll get distracted right away by some more lovely knitting.