Earlier this month I shared a few little travel knitting bag patterns, and the bag I’m sharing today wasn’t live when I was compiling that post but I think it would be a nice little bag to hold small things while you are traveling, or to use to hold any little things you need to wherever you are.
It’s called the Onigiri pouch because it looks like onigiri (a rice ball wrapped in a bit of nori, aka seaweed). The colors the designer, Dhiany Nanda, chose for their bag play up that description because the main part of the bag is an off white “rice” color, while the nori bit is gray, which looks a bit like seaweed.
Of course this would be a great stash-busting project in any colors. The original was worked in DK weight yarn, but you can use whatever you like to make a bag that’s a little bigger or a little smaller depending on your yarn weight and gauge.
The bag is worked from the bottom up in the round, and it is made double the length so that you can fold it inside itself to make the fabric stronger and thicker (and smooth on both the inside and the outside, which is nice). Once the main part of the bag is finished, you pick up stitches for the casing for the drawstring, then knit the nori separately and sew it on. The drawstring is an I-cord.
This little bag looks like a lot of fun and it includes lots of techniques like Judy’s Magic Cast On, increasing and decreasing, grafting, picking up stitches and making I-cord. But it’s also a small project so you can learn a lot of things fast and you don’t have to spend too much time with any of these techniques. For the most part it is just a lot of straight knitting.
You can grab a free copy of this pattern on Ravelry.
[Photo: Dhiany Nanda]
