Wednesday 17 October 2012

Crochet Tote Bag


Inspired by some lovely cotton in my yarn stash and this lovely crochet bag tutorial I decided to make my own crochet tote bag. I am absolutely thrilled with how it turned out and am incredibly proud of it! While it did take a while to make (I started it when we were on our family camping trip) it was quite simple and relaxing to hook up - the perfect project to work on while chatting with friends. In fact, one evening while crocheting with two of my girlfriends, I manged to crochet one entire ball of yarn into my bag; a great project and great friends made for a wonderful evening.  

I had six 2.0 oz balls of Floral Prints by Lily Cotton in my yarn bin which I used for my bag. While this yarn is mainly white, there are random spatters of pink, purple, orange and yellow throughout.  This random spattering of colors worked perfectly for my bag.  A quick check on the Lily site revealed that this yarn is no longer available, which does not surprise me as I bought it a few years back at a yarn sale, but they do have other spattered-type yarns that would work well if you were interested in making a bag of your own.

For the edging and the flowers I used Mod Pink by Bernat Handicrafter Cotton.  Again, this was in my stash and of all the pinks that I have, matched the pink in the Floral Prints best.    

I used a 4.0 mm hook for this project.  Even though the hook size recommended for both the yarns that I used is 5.0 mm, I chose a 4.0 mm hook; it made the stitches quite tight which worked out well for this type of bag. 

While I did use this tutorial as a guideline, I did make a few changes when working on my own project.   

For the bag itself, I followed the tutorial exactly with one exception: instead of changing colors on each round of the bag, I continued using the same yarn.  While I love the look of a multicolored bag, I am also happy with my own bag and how it looks hooked up in this lovely spattered yarn.

Here is what I changed: 

Handles:

Chain 101
Round 1: sc in second chain from hook, and in each chain across (100 sc).
Repeat Round 1 seven more times.  Your handle will be eight rows of single crochet wide.
Make two handles

Edging:
With outside of the bag facing you join pink to any stitch.  
Round 1: 1 sc in each stitch around, join to first sc with slip stitch.
Round 2: *chain 3, sc in next stitch* Repeat around top of bag, join with slip stitch to beginning chain.

Flowers:

Chain 6, join with slip stitch to make a ring
Round 1: chain 3, 20 dc in ring, join with slip stitch to first dc
Round 2: chain 1, sc in next stitch and then in each stitch around (20 sc)
Round 3: chain 1, sc in same stitch, *skip 1 stitch, 7 dc in next stitch, skip 1 stitch, 1 sc in next stitch*.  Repeat between ** four more times to make a total of five petals on the flower.
Make 4 flowers.

After attaching the handles and flowers to my bag, I added wooden buttons to the centers of my flowers.  

I am going to use this bag to tote my crochet projects around with me.  I hope you are inspired to make a crochet tote bag of your own.  It is a great project - useful and crafty.

Any questions about what I did here, please ask.

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