The Foundations of Chicago

The Base of Chicago

Every project has to start somewhere. This one starts with a rectangular base knit in garter stitch. In retrospect, it was probably a poor choice to use the charcoal colored Cascade 220 to do my demo project in, but I wanted this bag to have a wintery stylish quality, so the black/grey combo seemed like a good call.

The ugly turquoise colored strip is scrap yarn used for an invisible cast on (in case you care, it's Cascade 220 Quattro in a color that felts up like old carpet padding and is incredibly unattractive... all it seems to be good for is scrap yarn). I prefer this cast on to picking up stitches at the edge because I think it results in smoother bag edge, at least in my hands. In case

Invisible Cast On In Action

Here's the bottom right before picking up the stitches in the invisible cast on. That ridge of black stitches is what I am going to pick up -- with the non-working needle. Like so:

Picking Up Stitches in the ICO

After you pick up the stitches, you remove the waste yarn. You can do it by a reverse Kitchener process or you can just snip the waste yarn. I have a serious fear of scissors near my projects for anything but snipping yarn tails, so I always opt for the manual approach of unthreading the last row of the invisible cast on.

All Picked Up

Once the waste yarn is removed, all you have to do is knit across that row of picked up stitches on the non-working needle. Et Voila! It's time for circular knitting to commence. And this is where the fun begins. This bag is going to be all about the shaping. It worked in the minature test bag I tried... so this double sized bigger bag will be the acid test.