Kiss Me Bag

Oh, cotton yarn. So necessary and yet so hard on your hands. Some cotton blends or very high quality woven cotton yarns are nice and soft, but really durable cotton can do a number on your fingers. I had some extra cotton and wanted to find a project that wouldn't be tight and stiff. The Kiss Me Bag turned out to be just the thing. The finished product is not as awesome as I'd hoped, but the pattern was certainly enjoyable enough and used up my cotton skein. I turned my bag inside out because I prefer the other side of the shells.

What are your favorite ways to work with cotton?

Perfect Purse

Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope you are all enjoying yourselves, no matter what you do or don't believe or celebrate!

If you've got some holiday parties lined up and still need a purse to go with your outfit, I've got a great free pattern for you. The Perfect Purse by Lion Brand is a really versatile pattern. It's quite simple to make it bigger or smaller to suit your tastes and you can make it with almost any yarn you have available. I made it with some leftover Simply Soft. Is it sacrilegious to work up a Lion Brand pattern with a Caron yarn?

The original pattern suggests attaching a button in the middle of the top flap, but I decided to attach magnetic snaps to either side. I then covered the raw outsides of the snaps with small double crochet circles.

Check out the linked project pages on Ravelry for tons of creative slants on this pattern. Perhaps it's just what you need to spice up your outfit. It only took me about 2 hours in total, so it's possible to work it up in one sitting if necessary.

Before I go, can I just say how excited I am that folks are opening my crocheted gifts this morning? Be on the lookout for some long awaited FO posts in the coming days.

Happy Chrisma-hannu-kwanza-solstice!

Starling Purse

I'm a fan of futuregirl's blog as well as her patterns. I hooked up a sweet little purse thanks to her Starling Handbag pattern. Making purses is a great way to use up any lower quality or scratchy yarn that you may have on hand because purses take a lot of wear and tear anyway. I decided to add a flower to the purse to give it a little twist. The flower turned out a bit full, but still pretty. The crocodile stitch is really popular nowadays, so I made my flower by layering a single row of scales over itself.

The availability of excellent free patterns is amazing. I am really thankful to all of those people who make the effort to create a detailed pattern only to give it away, especially since I now know just how much work goes into pattern making. Make another 'hooker' smile sometime and drop them a line thanking them for their free pattern. They will really appreciate it. I appreciate you, futuregirl!

Amber Bee Bag

I have so many pattern ideas in my head that it feels like it could explode. It seems like I can't finish my projects fast enough because there is always another awesome plan waiting in the wings! Writing this purse pattern was extremely satisfying because it came out exactly as I had imagined it. I present to you my Amber Bee Bag.

I opted to leave the pattern plain and simple so that folks can add whatever embellishment they'd like to their bag. The pansy pictured as an example is based off of this free pattern, but the pattern was so difficult to follow that I just made most of it up. It might also be cute to attach a costume pin to this bag.

I named this pattern the Amber Bee Bag after my best friend, Amber B. Be on the lookout for more patterns named in honor of my friends and family.