A Designer's Inspiration

Hi there,

My buddy (co-blogger) Sheon celebrated her birthday this week. This was the perfect reason to crochet a bag and this is what I came up with:

The inspiration for this bag began when I set eyes on this crochet bag by Stella McCartney...I'm not sure which season it is from, but I loved its look and or course the fact that it is crocheted!

However, I wasn't too sure about how comfortably the metallic chain would sit on the shoulder and had no idea where to buy such chains of the 'will-not-rust' quality. When I saw this 'shiny' silver cord, I felt it was a good 'substitute'. Since I used a more textured stitching for the bag body, I decided to cut down on the embellishments as compared to the McCartney bag.

The cord was sewn to the bag using the same yarn and followed the 'grain' of the cord such that the blue yarn 'sat naturally' along the cord. Since the cord was a little to 'thin' as a strap, I crocheted a chain from the yarn and sewed it to the cord to 'thicken it:

As with my usual practice, I lined the bag - this time with a lovely piece of printed brocade from 'my secret stash' of fabrics. The bag also has a magnetic closure.

The biggest challenge was to create a strap which had an adjustable length but without the traditional 'slider' found on most bag straps such as:

(picture from 'Sewing with Colour')

After toying with about a gazillion ideas, I finally settled on this:

The nature of the yarn-wrapped cord enables it to wrap tightly around the silver ring and so the length can be adjusted by just 'easing' the two portions of the cord which wrap around the upper and lower  sections of the round silver ring.

Hope you've enjoyed reading about this as much as I've enjoyed making it! Have a great weekend!

Serena