A Colorful Crocheted Flower Handbag

It's been years since I've crocheted anything of significance.  A few months ago I became charmed by all the brightly colored crocheted flowers that I was seeing on Pinterest.

I poked around the various linking websites for weeks until I found a handbag design that I could adapt to what I was looking for.  Then I found some great black wooden handles at Joanns Crafts.  They're even made by a company called "Everything Mary".

I prefer using 100% cotton yarns.  I've used some of Paton's Grace Yarns and Lion Brands cotton yarns for the flowers.  For the body of the handbag I used Bernat's cotton De Lux yarn in black.

I used some straight pins to figure out where the front would be as I wanted to place the various crocheted flowers and leaves only on the front of the handbag.  A few of the flowers have little polka dot buttons added that I purchased at Michaels crafts in the scrapbook section.

Here's the finished design stuffed nicely so that I could stand it up to take this photograph.

 

I won't sugar coat it....there are a whole lot of hours in creating this handbag.  But if you work on the flowers a little at a time while watching TV and just collect them up it won't seem so long.

 

The dimensions on the handbag are 11" wide by 10" tall with a 3" wide base.  The wood handles add another 5".

I've placed this One of a Kind Crocheted Flower Handbag in my Etsy.com store for sale @ $165 bucks here :-) All of the photos will enlarge if you click on them once and then click again for a close up view.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look.  Please feel free to ask any questions you might have and I'll try to help.

 

Shopping & Creating

I'm not much of an after the Holidays bargain shopper but when Lucy mentioned on Facebook last week that Mary Engelbreit had some cute stuff available at Michaels Crafts for Valentine's Day that was all the inspiration I needed to get out and go see. 

What do these remind you of??  I found these little Cherries (at least to me they are) in the Christmas stuff mark down from $1.29 a bunch to a quarter each.

Cute little ME Valentine take out containers are available for .99.  The pink decorated clothes pins were marked down to .60 for the package.

Lots of cute stuff in the $1.50 bins like the Mary Engelbreit stamps in the first photo, several designs of cross stitch kits, and the mini scrapbook paper packages.

I picked up a couple of the little wooden bird houses for $1.50 and was inspired by the ME paper.
 

 

First I painted all the edges with some white acrylic paint.

Then it was cut...cut...cut...and glue...glue...glue.  Did you see the little window boxes on the sides of bird house?
Once all the glue dried I put a couple of coats of Mod Podge over all of the paper.  I still need to add a cute ribbon to hang the bird house with.  I forgot in my rush to get photos for my blog post.
I'm happy with how it turned out.  Next I'll work on making something with the mini Mary E. cross stitch kit.

Thanks for stopping by.  I'm linking up with Sue at It's A Very Cherry World.  Stop over and visit to see all the red that everyone has shared for "Rednesday" at Sue's blog.