Small bags in Murano wool for felting

In the weeks before going to Kangaroo Island, I thought I would have another go at knitting a bag from Murano wool, this time trying a small bag and using shade 022. I chose Ronaldsay Beach from Alison Underwood & Sue Parker's Felted Bags. The challenge and interest with this bag is a frilled top.

It knitted up quite quickly and easily.

I had my eye out for any emergency of the lean-to-the-right-hand-of the-knitter syndrome that had plagued my large Murano bag. I wondered if this was only a symptom of large projects and thought it worth giving it a try - I had bought 4 balls of this wool to play with.

Sure enough, after about 20 rows, the lean appeared. I think I can now conclude this is a problem with the wool.

I have been unable to any reference to this online but it is very hard to search for -'twist' 'lean', 'skew' and similar terms all bring up a range of standard knitting techniques.

This bag takes 100gms of wool - half the ball I have, so I decided to finish this one knitting as normal, then knit another one into the back of the stitch to see if that solves the problem.  Hopefully felting will remove the distortion.

The bag has two rows of bobbles around the top, just below the frill. I enjoyed finishing the bag in this way. The pattern is very easy, so I can keep it in my head. It's a good project to carry around, as the ball goes inside the bag!

 This time I determined where the handles went by using my eye, rather than counting rows from the marked corners - the problem I got into with the larger bag, as the distortion in the direction of the knitting leads to misalignment.

Here's the second bag - knitted using same wool, same pattern, but knitting into the back of the stitch. Perfectly straight! Many thanks to Katherine who suggested the remedy!

I am enjoying this pattern, so decided to make one bag before I started felting.