Swap completed.

FINALLY, I finished my swap for Mary Jane's Farmgirl friend.  It will go in the mail on Monday. Here's a peek.

Oh, I'll just go ahead and share the whole thing. 

The bag body was knitted with carpet yarn on the bulky knitting machine.  I  knitted the handles first.  For each handle I cast on 10 stitches and knitted to 36 rows.  If I do this again I will make them slightly longer.  For the bag body,  I  cast on 22 either side of 0, knitted about 80 rows, bound off four stitches on either side on the next two rows, knit 10 rows, cast on 4 stitches on each side on the next two rows, then knitted another 80 rows. 

I used an Anita Goodesign embroidery design.   I put a square of burlap under the design, and regretted the choice, because the embroidery foot caught several times in the loose weave of the burlap, causing registration errors and having to back up the design in order to work the foot loose.  After the initial quilting was done, however, mostly things went smoothly, and the embroidery was completed. Luckily the spots where the burlap was torn up was mostly covered by applique of the embroidery.

I fused the muslin lining of the bag to some stiff interfacing and traced the outline of the knitted fabric onto the muslin, cut it out, and used the serger to seam.  Then I seamed the knitted bag using the serger, turned down the lining by 1/4 inch  and stitched it down, then sewed around the top of the bag on the same stitching line to stitch the lining to the bag.

Altogether it did not turn out badly.