Felted bag from handspun

After searching three felting books I gave up on finding a pattern for exactly what I wanted. So picked up my size 10 Addi Turbo circulars, some heathery brown handspun from Abby (my wild Jacob ewe), a little silvery grey handspun from Charlotte (a beautiful CorriedaleX), and two partial skeins of store-bought blue and purple variegated wool yarns. The strap is made from thin leather which I recycled from a '70s-era crocheted vest y mom found at a yardsale. This is what I came up with.

Knitted in the round, the bag will stand up on it's own because when I reached the bottom, I placed two-thirds of the stitches on a holding needle and knitted a flap to form the bottom. When I had the width I wanted, I picked up the stitches on the holding needle and joined it all together. Made a rectangle (read flat) bottom for the bag rather than a more typical rounded one -- typical, at least, in the patterns I found. If they had a flat bottom they tended to be pieced with seam sewing required. Not something I wanted to be bothered with. I like to knit, not join seams with a yarn needle or crochet hook.

I made 4 YOs about 2 inches from the starting round and ran a piece of cotton yarn through the resultant holes while machine felting in order to make holes to run the the leather i-cord thru for the strap. The i-cord gave me the most problem because the leather was so thin I tended to break it by pulling it too tight when first knitting the cord. Once I learned to lessen the tension it was smooth sailing. An appropriate analogy as I knitted this primarily while we watched A&E's Horatio Hornblower series, a dvd set DS and DH received for Christmas and something we all enjoyed watching. And it was nice to see the whole series without any skips from scratches or other viewing problems as when we checked out the individual shows from the library.