Oh yes, let’s do a crochet post.
A bit of background; I never managed to master crocheting until about 5 years ago, when I got so frustrated that I couldn’t get my head around it that I was determined to learn, so I did.
My first project was a granny square based glasses case. This was the first thing I ever made. This was on the 31st of August 2016 (yeah ok I had to look it up on Facebook)
I haven’t done an awful lot of crocheting since, but got inspired by my friend Monique in the Netherlands showing off her crochet bag. It was a Mochila bag and the bag she had was from Ingrid Eefting of
Kralentik so I had a look and my mum and I got inspired to make one and so we bought a kit… this was Christmas 2016 I think from memory.
Since this was a new craft for me and the crochet pattern seemed complicated, my mum was going to have a go at making them… and she couldn’t get her head around it. So a few years ago I took my kit home to the U.K. with the intention of giving it a go myself. Obviously all sorts of stuff happened in between and I made some other craft projects and a lot of them didn’t get finished. So when I finished my rainbow shawl knitting project, I decided the Mochila bag was next.
The aim is to get something resembling this bag - photo courtesy of
Kralentik
It was hard, I struggled getting the bottom straight, just like mum struggled, so I took to YouTube and watched videos and I managed it.
So this is tapestry crochet, yes working with five threads at the same time, I know, I don’t go for easy… Four of the threads are running inside the crochet stitches and with each colour change the previous thread goes with the running threads inside and you crochet over the four threads. This is the start and the trick is to keep the bottom flat and the lines to go straight… It took some time to figure it out.
I didn’t stick to the pattern very well, but hey, it worked and it’s ok, my interpretation of the pattern, making it my own… I came up with not enough stitches at the end of the bottom and had to improvise, I’m sure the end result will look ok.
The next part is working up, yes, we keep working from the flat round bottom and the bag then goes up, there’s no separate bottom that gets sewn into the top of the bag, it’s all in one. Like I said, let’s not make things easy on ourselves… considering this is like my third ever crochet project…
I’m sure I’ve made more mistakes on this than I could show in photos and even now I have completed the first layer of the pattern I realise I made a mistake all the way around, so I had to decide to either go with it or pull it all out again and start from the bottom…
My progress up to the day before yesterday is this - see if you can spot the mistakes…
Let me know what you think in the comments!
