Oh, beloved Everlasting Bagstopper. It is only through laziness that I do not write a sonnet to ye you.  I love this pattern to pieces. I posted photos when I first finished it the knitting, but I’ve since attached the handles and…well, I love it. I just love it.  Just for reference, here’s the immediately after casting off pic, which shows the pattern’s unstretched dimensions:

The thing about knitting — indeed, I suspect this trend is evident in just about every single creative craft or impulse — is the tendency to shut one’s eyes to a project’s inadequacies or flaws. I know I certainly do this: I squint and tilt my head and tell myself “no-one will notice” that my turtleneck is around my nipples (which I guess would make it a turtlenipples). Or that certain “features” are part of its “charm”. Yuh-huh. Having recently resolved to be a little firmer with myself with regard to such tolerances, I finished sewing up the handles and drawstring to my first Recovery Bag and felt, well, a sense of anti-climax. I wondered if I had maybe been misled, in my weakened and feverish state, into casting on a project that I didn’t really want?  Whose production was more about the process of knitting simply and soothingly than about obtaining a useful object? In  my mind, I was preparing a whole blog post on the importance of being sincere with yourself, even in the face of painful truths.

I was a fool. This morning, determined to a least give my Recovery Bags a fighting chance, I loaded them up with things that I needed to take to work.

This one, in a silver cotton-linen blend, holds my lunch supplies for the week: observe the celery for a sense of proportion. The base of the celery is a little higher than that black drawstring line: it’s resting on a couple of lunchboxes. (That yellow thing is a banana.)  This thing just kept stretching and stretching and opening out and filling up!

The red one — full of music, paperwork, novels, notebooks and my netbook, simply swallowed everything I gave it:

I think I’ll have to take some more proportion-showing pictures — next to a loaf of bread or something — because I can’t believe how much these babies stretch. Not only stretchy, but really, really strong, too.  It really astonished and delighted me.  And now I have two bags that I made and that are incredibly cool and useful. I can’t ask for more than that from my knitting.