Water Bottle Holder

This (not very attractive) project is a water bottle carrier. It's made with the Mission Falls 1824 cotton that I bought a little while ago. It was made to fit a small 500ml bottle, but I have carried a one litre bottle in it - it's quite stretchy. Wear it diagonally across your body and keep your hands free while hiking.

I used 4.5mm dpns and cast on 40 stitches and worked one row knit, one row purl, one row knit, one row purl (which is how you get garter stitch in the round). After those four rows, I tried something different to get a truly random stripe pattern. I took a die and numbered my yarns from 1 to 5. I had a coin at the ready so I could flip it for heads or tails. Then at the beginning of each round, I tossed the die for the colour and the coin for the stitch (heads = knit, tails = purl).

I got in a right tangle, had to regularly straighten out my yarns, and I had WAY more purl rows than I would have liked, but I didn't cheat! When I was totally sick of fighting with the different colours, I just continued with one for the bottom part. At 7 inches long, I did one more purl row to make a ridge for the base, and then decreased like so:
K6, K2tog around
K5, K2tog around
K4, K2tog around
K3, K2tog around
K2, K2tog around
K1, K2tog around
K2tog around, use a darning needle to take the yarn through the last 6 stitches, gather them up and fasten off.

I knew if I knitted the handle as a flat strip or i-cord, I'd be at it for hours, so I cheated. A 16mm crochet hook, 5 strands of yarn (one of each colour) and 50 chain stitches had me a carrying strap in a couple of minutes! Knot it on either side and Bob's your uncle! (Sorry, British expression, don't know where the meaning of that originated.)