When I gather berries in garden and need to climb the tree, i take a bucket, thread it with belt (rope or lace) and wear it like a messenger bag.
So, this is my idea.
We have leather pouches for more or less exactly this.
Also there’s a bindle, which is a stick and some cloth if I remember correctly.
What about pottery and baskets? Add the recipes to the books “Love It or Weave It” and “Harry’s Pottery Bible”
Woven recipes would require you to gather straw but with the weaving you can make rudimentary clothes, baskets and more complicated things, a tall wicker basket with a rope that acts like a backpack, a smaller version that acts as a messenger bag.
Pottery would be a good replacement for cooking pots. A crock pot could be made to hot-hold food perishable food if filled and placed near a heatsource. Pottery can be glazed in ash or bone to make it watertight and sealable. After you build a real kiln you can craft ceramic goods that should be necessary for storing caustic acids and alkali and to make drawplates, resistors, and composite armor plates. Ceramic, with a lot of time and care, can be sharpened into a weapon. Ceramic knives are not made of steel and as such wouldn’t be affected by corrosion or magnetism, should either of those things become a threat to a player’s gear in the future. I’m picturing a magnetism-abusing nether creature or robot that can disarm you if you wield iron or steel weaponry.
I’m not super sold on the basket weaving, not much use for adding yet another material for making containers when we can already craft a factory-grade backpack or duffel bag at very low levels without needing to find a book for the recipe, and all the materials we need are a couple of window curtains. Not that I think it’s a bad idea per say, it’s just kind of redundant.
Your ideas about pottery are really interesting, we already have ceramic material in the game in very high-class armor plating and it would be interesting to see the material get a little more love. [size=6pt](What, no, I don’t just want the ability to repair my Dragonskin Vest, are you crazy ha ha ha)[/size]
In the Cataclysm, a man or woman will do just about anything to keep their mind off of things and their hands busy with something besides murder. I see no reason that a person with nothing much better to do couldn’t learn the basics of pottery with proper instruction and materials.
Plastic grocery bags would be nice, especially if they encumbered your hands.