Crochet Tote Bag

This is just a quick post about a nice little pattern I found. During the summer, my much loved and well used leather handbag broke. I'd had it for years, and it was well used and abused, so it owed me nothing, but I was gutted nonetheless! To make matters worse, this happened about a week before payday and I was way too smashed to go out and buy another one. Considering that I had no money, but plenty of yarn at home, the solution was obvious; make another one!!

So I browsed around the internet and eventually found one I thought looked good. My criteria for a day-to-day handbag is that it has to have plenty of room in it (not massive, but not a clutch purse either) and also it needs to have a reasonably long shoulder strap. The pattern I used was from Naztazia.com and it was simply titled "DIY Easy Beginner Crochet Tote". Although I'm not a beginner, I wanted a nice bag that I could knock out in a couple of hours, and I really liked the look of this one. She also has a YouTube channel, and most of her patterns have a crochet-along tutorial. I've watched a few of her tutorials before and they're very clear and easy to follow.

For the main part of the bag, I used 2 skeins of Red Heart Super Saver which I had originally bought to make a wrap/stole, but found the colours didn't really work. The lighter contrast colour was also Red Heart Super Saver, and it was just the end of a skein I had left over from another project. 

It took me about 2.5 or 3 hours to complete the bag, and I'm delighted with the finished product. Using two strands at once makes it very sturdy, and it doesn't stretch or lose its shape, which is a problem I've had with other knitted or crocheted bags I've made in the past. To give you an example, I've had my large wallet, phone, glasses, baby wipes, tissues, and a full 750ml bottle of Pepsi Max in this thing, and there was no change whatsoever in the shape, and the strap is thick enough that it doesn't dig in to my shoulder.

The only downside to it is that it's not waterproof, so I've had to put it away in the last few weeks and buy (faux) leather handbag with a zip. Unfortunately a crochet handbag just isn't practical during Autumn and Winter in Ireland. Actually, lets face it, it probably wouldn't be practical in Spring either! But I fully intend on putting it to good use again next summer!!

Pattern: Naztazia.com DIY Easy Beginner Crochet Tote or Handbag

Hook: 5mm hook from my own collection

Fastener: Wooden duffle that I robbed from my Mum's button box :D

Yarn: Red Heart Super Saver Economy

           Main colour: Fall (2 x skeins)

           Stripe colour: Buff (about two thirds of a skein)

Halloween Blanket

I wish I was still young enough to trick-or-treat

Greetings folks! I'm back to give the skinny on my latest project!

If any of you read my Red Heart yarn review, then you may remember I mentioned that the reason I took the plunge and bought the yarn was because I wanted to make a blanket for my son. When I wrote my review on the yarn, I was a few squares in to the blanket, and I'm happy to say that having completed the whole thing, I'm still every bit as in love with the yarn as I was then. Phew!

So to get right down in to it, first I'll give you the basics of the blanket design (I'll link the pattern below for anyone who wants to have a crack at it themselves) it's a fairly simple layout - 9 squares and a border around the edges. Obviously there are varying colours and such, I'll get to that further down.

The squares are solid granny squares, and I have to say I really like how these are constructed. Usually in a granny square - solid or traditional - you increase when you get to the corner space where there's a chain2 gap, and into that gap, you put two double crochet, chain two, two double crochet. With this method you always end up with a little gap in the corners, so it's never completely solid.

there ends up being an X shape across your work

However, using the method in this pattern you get a completely solid, and in my opinion, much neater looking square. The difference is that when you get to the last stitch in a side you do two doubles and one treble in that stitch, then one treble and two doubles in the first stitch on the next side, which makes the point in the corner solid, while also increasing the number of stitches in the next round. 

Each round ends with a slip stitch and the next round starts with a chain3 and continues as before, the only thing you need to watch out for is that you don't accidentally skip the slipped stitch when you get to the end of the next round, otherwise that side will be one stitch short. Because of the way each row is almost fastened off before the next one begins, it made changing colours very easy, and the join between the colours is seamless.

The squares worked up quite quickly, I would be able to get a whole one done while I was sitting watching TV in the evening. Once the squares were done, it was time to start the faces.

The many faces of Halloween

As you can see in the picture above, four of the squares have assorted faces, and one says 'Boo!'. The faces were easy enough to make, although I found with some of them there were still a lot of gaps showing between the stitches when they were finished. For example, the triangle eyes and noses were quite 'gap-y' and so were the oval shaped eyes on the second face from the left in the picture above. The instructions tell you to leave a long tail after you fasten off, so I left an extra long tail and used a yarn needle to weave the yarn in and out of the stitches to fill in the gaps.

The 'Boo!' was slightly more difficult, to make. The two letter 'O's were fine, as was the exclamation mark. The 'B' was slightly trickier, and it ended up looking like a number 8. It took a fair amount of manipulating it, when I was stitching it to the square, to get it to look like a 'B'.

Once all the faces were done, it was just a matter of stitching them on to the various squares. One thing I will say is plan carefully when you're putting the face pieces on to the squares - I'll go in to a bit more detail about this further down. I found the easiest way to get the faces right was to lay the square out flat and then pin the pieces down before sewing them on. It would be extremely rare that I'd pin anything in crochet. In fact, I don't think I've ever done it before, however it was the best way to keep all the pieces in the places you want them, because I found that even the piece I was working on tended to move around a lot as I was sewing it - I'd leave the pins in right until I had the whole piece pretty much sewn on.

Never have I been happier to finish seaming a piece together

Next step was sewing all the pieces together. It said on the pattern to sew the pieces together using the back loops only. It didn't specify what sort of stitch to use, so I used a mattress stitch to give as seamless a join as possible. Mattress stitch is a fairly strong stitch - it's also used to sew sleeves and seams in sweaters, so I figured this would be a good robust stitch which would be capable of standing up to a vigorous toddler.

Sewing through the back loops only was a bit of a faff, to be honest. There ended up being a gap where 4 pieces intersected, which I had to go back and sew tighter when the whole thing was completed. The way I put it together was I sewed the top three squares together, then the middle three, and then the bottom three, so that I ended up with three long strips. I then sewed the strips together. 

I mentioned earlier about planning the layout of the faces carefully, the reason I say this is because when you're sewing the pieces together through the back loops, it's hard to weave in tail ends of yarn neatly. When you lay out your face pieces, do it so that when they're sewn on, the yarn tail from the square will be pointing towards the outside of the blanket. Similarly, when you're sewing the pieces together, rotate the multicoloured pieces so that their yarn tail is pointing towards the outside as well. Obviously, you won't be able to do this with the 'BOO!' square, because it's in the centre. The first round of the border is just double crochets, so the yarn tails from the squares can be woven in neatly and securely with those stitches.

Before your boder is on, the blanket should look like some sort of Halloween amoeba 

Once the pieces were sewn together, the border was a piece of cake. The first round was just double crochets using the grey yarn, then the second round was 'shells' using the black yarn. A 'shell' is when you make a single crochet, skip two stitches, put 5 double crochets in the next stitch, skip two stitches, then repeat all the way around.

So there you have it! The Halloween blanket is finished and my little boy is delighted with it. He's been sleeping under it every night since I gave it to him. I think overall it took me about 10 days to finish it. I really like this pattern, and I think it's something that could be adapted quite easily to be used for a different occasion, like Christmas, Valentine's day, etc.

Yarns: RedHeart.com

2 x Red Heart Super Saver #312 Black

2 x Red Heart Super Saver #254 Pumpkin

1 x Red Heart Super Saver #356 Amethyst 

1 x Red Heart Super Saver #400 Grey Heather

1 x Red Heart Super Saver #672 Spring Green

Pattern: Pumpkin Face Throw

Red Heart Yarn

Disclaimer: This review is my own honest opinion of this product. I am not sponsored by, or affiliated with the manufacturer or seller of this yarn, in any way. I purchased it myself and I am not being paid, or given free gifts, in exchange for writing this review.

"I'm in love!!"

This is the first 'review' post I've done, but since this is a product that I've been DYING to try out, I think it's a good one to start with. Perhaps I'll make reviews a regular feature, we shall see.

As I said, I've been wanting to try out Red Heart for ages. A huge number of knitting/crochet YouTube channels and blogs seem to use this yarn for their tutorials/projects. I've also made a lot of various bits and bobs using their free patterns (they've got tonnes of fantastic ones on their website). 

I've been in their online shop numerous times drooling over their wares, but what had put me off ordering up until now was that they didn't have a list of shipping rates for Ireland, and I didn't want to fill up my cart with goodies only to get to the checkout and find out that shipping costs more than the actual order (I've experienced this with a lot of sites, and I really can't justify spending $30 to have a $25 order shipped) However, their website has had a complete overhaul and they now have a super clear shipping table showing the exact prices for loads of different countries. Their shipping prices are very reasonable when you consider the size of the packaging required - when you're shipping balls of yarn it's not so much the weight that'll push costs up, it's the fact that it usually has to be shipped in a box if you're ordering more than one or two balls.

Anyhoo, enough about that. One of the projects I'm currently working on is a Halloween blanket for my son (it's another Red Heart pattern, I'll link it below) and the colours used in it are orange, spring green, royal purple, grey, and black. Now, because this is an American company, their patterns use yarn in US weight terminology. Most of them use 'worsted weight' yarn, and the UK/Irish equivalent is 'aran weight'. 

This is where I usually run into problems, because if I want my project to be the correct size, I need to use the same weight yarn (or else try to work out the stitch count with different size hooks/needles and a different weight yarn, and my poor addled brain just isn't up to that challenge). 

I have two main gripes about the aran weight yarn that's available in Ireland:

1. When it comes to variety of colours, pickings are pretty slim - if you want traditional 'tweedy' type colours, or baby colours, then you're grand. If you're looking for bold, vibrant, funky colours then you'll find it difficult to find something to suit. 
2. The yarn thickness is massively inconsistent - I've found the thickness varies hugely depending on the brand you use. I've also found that even within the same brand, certain colours are WAY thinner than others. (this was particularly problematic when I was making my stitch-cation afghan, some of the yarns which were aran yarns were as thin as a lot of double knit yarns)

So with those two things in mind, I bit the bullet, and ordered the yarn for the blanket from Red Heart. The estimated shipping time was something like 20 working days, so I was a little concerned that I'd be under the gun to get it finished in time for Halloween but it actually arrived in about a fortnight, so I was pleasantly surprised.

Now, if it's not already evident from what I've written so far, I had very high hopes for this yarn, so I was almost nervous opening the box because if it didn't live up to my expectations I'd have been devastated! 

Well, let me tell you, I was not disappointed. I can honestly say that this is, hands down, THE BEST YARN that I've ever worked with. The yarn weight and thickness is consistent throughout all the balls. The colours are beautiful (especially the purple, oh my God, the purple). It's a good sturdy yarn, exactly what an aran weight yarn should be. It's just a dream come true, right down to the little details, like how on each one of the yarn skeins there's a centre-pull and at the other you can pull from the outside, whichever you prefer (I'm a centre-pull gal, myself) and there's a handy dandy guide on the wrapper to tell you which end is which. There's also a free pattern on the reverse of the wrapper.

"idiot-proof yarn band"

So in case there was any doubt, my rating of this yarn is two very enthusiastic thumbs up. In fact if I was some sort of mutant and had extra thumbs, I'd be putting them up, too. Seriously. I know I sound like a broken record but I actually can't get over how much I love this yarn. If I wasn't already married, I'd be putting the moves on it (providing there isn't some sort of law preventing that sort of thing). It goes without saying that I'll be buying more of this, I'm planning my Christmas gifts so will likely be purchasing the supplies for those in the coming weeks. Hooray!!

Oh, in case anyone is wondering, the other yarns pictured in the top photo are Lion Brand Yarns. I'm making a poncho for my sister using those. So far, I'm liking them a lot. Hopefully I'll do another review when I've gotten further along with the poncho and have a better feel for how they are to work with.

Yarns I bought:

Red Heart Super Saver in:

Shade 312 - Black (2 skeins)

Shade 356 - Amethyst (1 skein)

Shade 254 - Pumpkin (2 skeins)

Shade 672 - Spring Green (1 skein)

Shade 400 - Grey Heather (1 skein)

Halloween blanket pattern: Pumpkin Face Throw