Knitted Chalk Bag Redux

My simple knitted chalk bag has been serving me well at the bouldering gym so far, and has even gotten some compliments from other climbers. I’ve gotten another friend to start climbing with us, and instead of carrying around her chalk in the plastic baggie it came in, I made her a bag of her own:

The black and blue color scheme might be more appropriate for my bag, as every climbing session I bang my knees or legs into something: a hold, the wall, the floor, etc. My knees are so often bruised it has become a running joke with the friends I climb with.

Instead of making an I-cord drawstring like I did before, I used a round shoelace and a drawstring cord lock, which is so much easier to use. The I-cord is too thick to really feed through a cord lock, so I just tie it closed. It doesn’t close as tightly, though, so everything in my bag gets a decent dusting of chalk.

This pattern is available for free at pdxstitch.net // check out the Ravelry pattern page

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Simple chalk bag for rock climbing

I know it’s been radio silence here on the blog for nearly a year, but I can assure you that it doesn’t mean I haven’t been crafting. The time has been full of ups and downs – a new job turning into an old job, new friends turning into old friends – but I’ve still been busy working away at the Helix Nebula cross stitch, knitting various things, and even taking up a new hobby: bouldering.

The great thing about bouldering (at least inside a gym, which is where I do it), is that you don’t need much equipment: just shoes and a bag of chalk to keep your hands dry. For obvious reasons, I don’t much care to make my own shoes, but making a bag to keep chalk in seemed a simple proposition. And I could make it colorful and fun, so it didn’t look like everyone else at the gym’s plain black chalk bags.

I poked around Ravelry and r/knitting for inspiration, but didn’t like how the patterns I was finding required picking up stitches on the cast-on edge to knit the bottom. I was thinking of knitting from the bottom up in one piece, analogous to a toe-up sock, but the math was too confusing to get a nice circular bottom. So I just knit from the top down, creating a channel for the drawstring, too.

For the ombré effect, I loosely followed the chart from this ombre hat pattern by Emily Dormier. The bag lends itself well to all kinds of decorative colorwork or stitch patterns. If I had infinite free time and a need for a lot of little bags, I’d make a rainbow striped bag, or a three-color ombré fade.

Get the free pattern from Ravelry or PDXstitch.net.

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