Cable Knit Bag

This is my first attempt at cable stitch, and it turned out quite well I think!  I followed one of the projects in my Knitty Gritty (knitting for the absolute beginner) book by Aneeta Patel. 

There are a couple of mistakes on the bag, but I'm trying not to be too much of a perfectionist and remember that I'm only a beginner, so mistakes are normal, and it hasn't affected the look of the bag too much.

The main mistake I made with the bag is that I accidentally put an extra row of knitting in at some point which turned the cable stitch to the other side of the bag, as you can just about see in the picture below.  But since it's near the handles, it's not very noticeable, so I don't really mind.

Also, when stitching on the handles, I attached them to each side of the bag instead of giving each side of the bag its own handle.  It's not really a mistake as such, because it works, but it's not what was suggested in the book and was an absent-minded change to the pattern suggested.  The book doesn't actually explain how to sew the handles on in detail so I sort of made it up as I went along, but you can't actually see the stitches used to attach the bag so I think I did a good job with it.

At some point I had a major disaster when I got to the end of a row and counted the stitches... I'd dropped a stitch at some point without realising but then couldn't see in the pattern where it was.  I did undo the row carefully and found what I thought was the dropped stitch.  It took a lot of creative thinking and I thought I'd rectified it correctly until I knitted the next row and noticed a random big loop in the row below, but apart from it looking a little odd, it's not very noticeable and the work isn't going to unravel, so never mind!

I like the look of this little bag and was pleased with the finished product.  You can adjust this pattern quite easily to make bigger or smaller bags as needed, so I'd definitely experiment with this technique now I know how to do it!