I was given an Australian aborigine string bag a while back, and have been puzzling for ages how it was made - I now know it was made on a frame of some sort, because what I am making has the same stitch pattern. I was interested to find that it also used the cast off row as the base, because it is firmer than the cast on. This means that the stitch isn't immediately obvious, because if you assume that work goes from the base up, it doesn't make sense. It has a different handle structure, which I am going to try - I've been using crochet where the aborigines used blanket stitch around a bundle of threads.

Penny