March 21, 2016

Green Shell Purse

For my birthday a friend gifted me some yarn from her stash. Of the four skeins she gifted me, one was Be Sweet Bamboo in Khaki Green. It's a very soft small skein of about 110 yards.

As I only had one skein I checked around Ravelry for something small and suitable for one color. For some reason this yarn wanted to be a little purse and luckily enough I found a good pattern. It's a free pattern by Pierriot Yarns called KC Shell Stitch handbagNote: It is only written as a diagram with minimal directions, so hopefully you can read those if you want to make one.

The base of the purse is a pretty standard circle and works up fast despite using such a small 3.5mm hook.

I did have trouble starting into the shell rows as I was unsure how row 1 of the shells lined up with the last row (13) of the circle base. If you are also having trouble, know that it worked out for me to skip three sc between the first and last dcs of the shells and the sc anchors between. You should also be able to tell that because row 2 has three chains between each hdc cluster.

For row 2 of the shell part, you do chains and a "3-hdc bobble" which turns out is not what my instincts told me it would be. I used this video by Bethintx1 to learn how to do it properly, working the yarn over and through three times as indicated.

Personally I dislike the holes in between the shells being so open, when you could easily do another shell instead of the puff to make that space smaller. I feel like stuff might fall out the way it is. Course it would not be hard to line this purse either. In any case I just followed the pattern as written.

I did not end up doing all 7 rows of the net stitch at the top since I was running out of yarn.
As it was I was only able to do one full drawstring of 70 chains, and the second was 60 chains before I ran out. Close enough though that I still used both and I think they do alright.

It is a very thin but soft bag and the bottom disk stays nice and open. I could easily fit my iPhone 6 plus, wallet and keys, but not much else. I also like how small it is, perfect for travel. I might have to try to make one in a nicer color though; silver or black perhaps.


Difficulty: Easy + (for reading patterns)
Time to complete: 5 hours