Stylecraft Blog Tour 2018

Hello! And welcome back to my corner of the world for my second year participating in Stylecraft’s Blog Tour.

Yesterday you were with Phil of The Twisted Yarn, and tomorrow you’re heading over to Julia of Hand Knitted Things, but today is my turn 😀

As you’ve already seen, this year the blogstars were given a choice between two colour packs, one in a mix of Bambino and Bellissima, and one in Bellissima.

If you haven’t seen Bellissima yet, it’s a gorgeous new yarn from Stylecraft, a ‘grown-up’ version of Bambino that comes in fourteen vibrant colours. I already knew I loved Bambino – I made a baby blanket in it earlier in the year – so I was predisposed to love Bellissima too. It’s 100% acrylic, but softer than any other acrylic I’ve ever used. It’s beautifully plied (I think that’s the word!) and works up with a lovely stitch definition.

And for this year’s blog tour entry, I plumped for the Autumn Leaves colour pack.

That’s one ball each of (left->right) Mellow Yellow, Single Cream, Rio Red, Sugar Snap and Ash Rose. Aren’t they gorgeous? I love the colour combination. It’s lush and vibrant and autumnal.

I was a little unsure about what I’d like to do with it, at first. As my regular readers know, it’s been a bit of a tough year for me, and it’s been quite hard to get my designing brain working. But after a few days of sitting and looking at the colour pack, I worked out what I wanted to do.

I wanted to design a project bag with this yarn.

I have bags. I have lots of bags. More than I could ever possibly use. Canvas bags, plastic bags, tote bags with cool designs on them, bags with long handles and bags with short handles. But none of them are big; they’re all small or medium . What I really wanted was a big bag. A bag that I could shove a whole blanket’s worth of yarn into (plus, if necessary, the blanket!).

In the end, I have possibly gone slightly overboard in terms of size. In retrospect, it could have been a row shorter. However, I used up almost all of the yarn in the colour pack, and it is definitely big enough to take a blanket’s worth of yarn, and/or a blanket 😀

So, I hereby present the Harlequin bag:

Ahh, I love my Harlequin bag!

Inspired by traditional pantomime harlequin costumes, it’s composed of diamonds and triangles that are then worked together in slip stitch to create a lattice effect. The base is a circle, making it nice and roomy. The straps are long enough to go over my shoulder, but are easy enough to make longer or shorter if you wish.

With the five balls of Bellissima, I made a bag 17”/43cm tall and 18.5”/46cm in diameter. As I said, roomy! You could easily make it shorter by omitting a row of diamonds, though.

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Pattern

You will need:

• One ball each of Stylecraft Bellissima in Mellow Yellow, Single Cream, Rio Red, Sugar Snap and Ash Rose.
• 4mm hook.
• Tapestry needle for sewing in ends.

You may also find it useful to have safety pins to aid in assembling the bag.

Gauge isn’t essential for this project, but to achieve a bag 17”/43cm tall and 18.5”/46cm in diameter, each diamond should measure 2.75”/7cm at the widest point (at the end of row seven) and 5”/12.7cm tall from point to point when finished.

The pattern uses US terms.

Please note that this pattern is untested, but it should be straightforward to follow.

You can find it here as a free Ravelry download.

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As an added bonus, those lovely people over at Stylecraft are running a giveaway of the colour pack.

All you need to do is CLICK HERE to enter.

The competition is open from 10am GMT today (7th October) until 10am tomorrow. The winner will be emailed by Stylecraft – don’t forget to check your junk mail 🙂

Good luck!