Wednesday, September 29, 2010

CROCHET BEACH BAG

Goodness gracious, where has the time gone?  No one told me that having a teeanager and a pre-teen would be so busy! I can only imagine what parenst go through that have more than two actively involved kids....We've been busy with sports, music lessons, and the plain old simple day-to-day activities that consumes so much time.  Would I have it any other way, NO WAY!  Love being busy...keeps me out of trouble (hee, hee!). 

Anyways I want to share with you my recent crochet project.  Thinking back, my first crochet project was probably when I was about eight years old.  Think it was a little lap blankie.  My mom is a self-taught crochet genius that can crochet almost anything just by looking at it and taught me the simple stitches to get me by little projects.  Over the years, she's made tons of blankets (baby blankets up to king size blankets) as well as house slippers, hats, beanies, gloves, ponchos and the list can go one and on.....Luckily, I inherited a few and my kids got a few of their very own "grandma's yarn blankies".

In one of my travels to visit her,  my mom gave me some colored twine she picked up from the local thrift store.  She actually picked them up from a "FREEBIE" bin and insisted I take them.  The only place I can recall seeing this type of twine was at Chinese bakeries where it is used to tie up boxed take out orders.  Here are a few pics of the colorful twine, very pretty:

Just a few weeks after, I saw a cute crochet bag at a popular surf shop and the material reminded me of the twines from my mom sitting in my closet.   As always, I took a close look at the bag, studied the stitches and concluded it was mostly done in chain and single crochet stitches.  EASY (I think)!  When I came home, I went straight to the computer and searched for a crochet pattern.  Wadda you know, I found the perfect bag.....and even had the almost exact color as the bag in the surf shop and instructions.  Found the pattern here at knit-o-matic.
Although the pattern calls it a grocery bag, I think it will do just as fine as a beach bag.  The twine is like a plastic yarn texture so if it gets wet, don't think it will hurt it.

Crochet Beach Bag

Love the fact that the bag is "airy" for those wet swim suits and soggy towels.  There's nothing worse than the smell of that wet beach towel that was fogotten in a plastic bag, uh, maybe last week...eeew!

Beach anyone?