Summerberry Yarn Bag

I have been trying to finish off one or two projects that have been lurking in the long grass, so to speak, and one of them is this bag which I almost completed last summer but which failed to reach the finish-line and sat, bristling with stitch-markers, for nine months or so, awaiting a pair of handles and a lining. It was driven, not by the need for a bag (I have plenty!) nor by the colours (they were defined by availability) but by the yarn itself.

Does this ever happen to you? Working with a particular yarn is just so delicious, you want to go on and on, hooking into the sunset with it? It's a surprise yarn for me, a departure from my normal go-to cotton or wool blends. It's a 100% microfibre DK weight yarn and the fabric it makes, has wonderful stitch definition and drape. It is King Cole Smooth and it is exactly what it says it is, on the tin, or rather the label - smoooooth!

I bought a random sample ball when I made my African Flower bag last year and needed as many acrylic brights as I could lay my hands on and found, brooding among the light and bright Stylecraft Special DK, a gorgeous velvety, deep purple ball of it. It worked rather well with the bright Stylecraft Special pinks and oranges of the African flowers. And it was so addictive to hook with that when the African flowers were finished, I wanted to make something entirely out of this magic stuff, that even Rumpelstiltskin would be proud to have spun. My local yarn store only carried the purple, for some reason, but a little trawling around revealed there were other colours to be had.

Not all the colours you might look for and heavily weighted in some areas of the spectrum but quite a number nonetheless. Mossy and grassy greens, the colour of fruit leaves; a lone, pale apple or mint green that is sadly now discontinued (as are some of the others colours I bought last year); muted, soft, sky blues and a bright turquoise that didn't quite seem to fit predictably into the rest of the range's palette; cranberry, redcurrant-jelly and cherry reds; creamily muted, blueberry and blackberry mauves as well as the gorgeous, deep blackcurrant purple I'd first come across; a clutch of strawberry and raspberry pinks to gladden Mrs T's pink-loving soul. No yellow or orange; no dark green, no tawny ambers or browns, nor any neutral grey, although they seem to have added some of these colours to the range now, I think, as well as some pale pastels, that weren't there last year. Many of the colours are very close in shade to one another, rather than distinctively separate. I bought one ball of each of as many colours as my budget would allow, in addition to my original purple, from here. It's not as cheap as Stylecraft Special DK but it's less than half the price of many more expensive yarns and it comes in good, fat 100g balls.

I'd been toying with making a hooky stash bag for a while and here was the opportunity to make one in delicious double stripes of single crochet (US terms, so I am talking about double crochet in UK ones), going with the colour-weighting dictated by what was available, grouping related colours together and seeing what would happen. The result was rather pleasing. Unexpectedly pleasing actually. Even though there are colours here that perhaps I wouldn't have picked on their own from an unrestricted palette, if I had had one.

I used the pattern for "Red's Goodie Basket" from Julie Armstrong Holetz's book  "Uncommon Crochet" as a starting point but I went "off piste" a bit - making it stripy, larger and with longer handles. The original pattern actually works this bag up in fine, red, leather cord and the handles are shallow ones, integrated to the top of the sides. I wanted longer straps to be able to sling the bag over a shoulder or the back of a chair so I simply made these at the end and stitched them in place with my sewing machine, after lining the bag (and the handles themselves) with a scarlet cotton print dotted with bright flowers. There wasn't quite enough of the fabric to make the lining without a bit of judicious piecing together but what's a bit of patchwork between friends?!

I've hidden the machine stitching, that secures the handles firmly in place, with hooky geranium flowers:

They are the same flowers I used on my Blue Sky Bunting here. I would never normally have put these two reds together but to create a geranium look-alike they work OK, I think. The two shades of red, one dull and the other bright, give the flowers a sort of three-dimensional shading rather than a simple colour contrast, which is what I would usually have chosen.

I think single crochet is my favourite of all crochet stitches. I love the simplicity and density of the resulting fabric, the rhythmic easy stitches and the fact that by altering your hook size and the thickness of yarn you can make it stiff enough to stand up on its own, as in the blue and pink hooky bowls I made at the end of last year here or these, more recent, experimental neutral ones, in pebbly colours, that I made in the Spring, using, in both cases, a double strand of DK weight cotton on a 4mm hook.

Or you can make a fabric that is beautifully drapey and floppy as with this bag with one strand of DK weight microfibre yarn on the same 4mm hook.

As I say, the colours are weighted very much towards one end of the spectrum - the red end - even the greens have the red-tones of the greens of early Spring and Summer. Put together, the colours reminded me of bowls of summer fruit - unhulled strawberries, blackcurrants on leafy stalks, raspberries nestling on a bed of their own leaves, blackberry flowers cheek by jowl with the fruit, still on bramble stems - so the bag became a Summerberry Bag and as its function is to contain yarn, it became a Summerberry Yarn Bag.

Being microfibre, the bag is practical - easily washable - and the only disappointment about it is my crochet mascot's. Duck hoped he could commandeer this as a balloon basket, powered by a bunch of helium balloons tied on to the handles but unfortunately it's a bit too heavy, so his dreams of crossing the garden, the Channel, or even the Atlantic, in a stripy, hooky Montgolfier have been dashed!  He's consoled himself with taking up residence in it anyway and it's good and roomy - enough space for him and plenty of yarn.

Duck's ballooning ambitions aside, it's satisfactory all round! 

Happy Weekend everyone! 

Hope it's a good one - I, (for once), am not working all Saturday and am taking the opportunity for a teensy-weensy yarn expedition with a blogging friend. 

Never mind a balloon basket / stash bag, we may need a trailer for the transportation of our haul, at the end of the day! Tee hee!

E x