Bonita Project Bag

Hi everybody. Welcome to our live crochet event. I'm Brenda K. B. Anderson and I'm so excited to teach you guys my newest project.

This is the Bonita Project Bag. It's just a cute little zipper pouch that's lined and it is just big enough for working on a small project. It's also big enough for one of those larger acrylic gains that you can get at the big box stores in case you're wondering if you can fit that in here, you totally can, with some tools and other things. And I named this project the Bonita Project Bag after my Aunt Bonnie, because my Aunt Bonnie is the first person who ever made me a granny square. When I was little, like a toddler, she made me a granny square vest, which was a big granny square in the front, a granny square in the back, and then two straps with little buttons, it was super cute.

So every time I see a granny square, it reminds me of my awesome Aunt Bonnie, who's a lifelong crocheter. And hi Bonnie, I hope you're watching this. But anyway, I am excited to show you how to work up this bag. So first, we're gonna talk about what kind of materials you need. You will need six balls of different colored yarn, about 50 to 60 yards.

You know, just go raid your stash, find some leftovers. They'll be about this big, maybe even a little bit smaller than this, like the size of an apple, or similar to the size of your fist when you ball them all up. Just to give you an idea about how much you need. So you'll need six different colors about this size, and you'll need your pattern. And to get your pattern, you can just go to the description or look in the comment section.

There's a link and you can download your free pattern. You can follow along, or you can do that afterward if you like. You will need a small amount of fabric for the lining, and the dimensions are in your pattern. You'll need a zipper, probably a 16-inch zipper, and we'll probably be cutting that down. But I would wait to purchase your zipper until after you crochet up this bag, because it doesn't really matter so much if your bag's a little smaller, a little bigger than mine.

But if you wait to buy your zipper, then you'll know exactly what size you need. But probably a 16-inch zipper and it can be separating or non-separating, doesn't matter. I'll show you why later. You'll need a couple marking tools. If you have, for marking on fabric for your lining, if you have a dark colored fabric, I recommend using a silver Sharpie, that shows up really well, or chalk, you can use that too.

And for a lighter fabric, you can use fabric marker, you can use a pencil, pen, whatever. You'll need a little piece of cardboard if you're gonna make the pompom, that's about two inches wide. That just helps you wrap the yarn around it to create a cute little pompom for the zipper. You'll also need, I can't forget this, the crochet hook. The crochet hook that I used is an H.

It's a five millimeter hook, but you can use any size that will get you the gauge that is listed in the pattern. So the gauge is the size of the square, of each granny square. So you'll work up the square and then check it and make sure it matches. If your square ends up bigger than mine, then I would go down a hook size. If it's smaller than mine, then you could go out up a hook size, but if you don't care if the size of your bag changes, then you can just go ahead.

But that gauge will give you a good indication as to whether your fabric is gonna be about the same stiffness as mine with the same drape. You don't wanna have a lot of drape. You want it to be like a fairly structured bag, but the lining will help with that. Oh, and speaking of the lining, I should mention things like, like heavier weight linings, like denim, bull denim, canvas, you could even use an old pair of jeans that you can like cut some chunks out and steam them together. It doesn't matter if you have seams in it.

This project is in the spirit of using up what you have. So you don't need to go out and buy anything special for that. And a couple of stitch markers will be helpful, although you probably won't need them. But you know, if you're newer to crocheting and you wanna keep track of things a little better, at least one stitch marker would be good. And you'll need a few sewing pins also to keep your fabric in line as you're sewing it.

So speaking of the fabric, if you don't have a sewing machine or if you've never, you know, if you haven't done much hand sewing before, don't worry, I'm gonna show you how to do those steps. You can either hand sew it or you can use a sewing machine for a couple different parts, and we'll go through that later. All right, so let's talk about this bag a little bit. The bag is created by making eight granny squares. Okay?

So there's one, two, three, and then four, five, six, and then on the very bottom, there's two, so seven and eight. So there's eight granny squares. And then after you attach all the granny squares together, they get stitched together. That's when you work this upper part where you go around and round and round and single crochet. It's very simple.

This is a great project. If you're newer to crochet, you know, if you've done a dishcloth or a couple of samples already of other things, or maybe you made a granny square blanket, this is like the perfect thing for you. It's a good step up from that. Not that you need, it's not a step up, it's just like slightly more complicated than making a blanket just because it's got the zipper and the structure in it. Okay, so let's start by looking at our pattern here.

In the back of the pattern... Well, actually you'll find abbreviations for all of the, the definitions of all the abbreviations in your pattern. So if you're reading it and you're like, "What is a Ch, what's a DC?" Then you can just look there and it'll tell you what that means. Oh, I wanted to mention right underneath the instructions here, it says granny square, make eight. Right here, it's listing from each granny square that I made, I listed, these letters are all listing a color.

So when you choose your colors, say you've got, let me pull out six colors here. So your balls will be bigger than these. This is what size they should be. But these are just the scraps that I had for this demo here. So let's imagine that these are your six colors that you're gonna use in your bag.

So arrange them. If you wanna go by my color system, which you absolutely don't have to, you can just ignore it. Maybe you only have two colors of yarn and you wanna use that, you can just alternate, you know, black, white, black, white, or whatever you have. You don't have to stick to my color plan here, but I wanted to give you a color plan because I know a lot of people don't wanna think about the color. They just wanna follow the directions and you know, have something that turns out how they imagined it would.

So after you figure out which six colors you're going to use, you can arrange them in whatever order you want them to appear at the top of the bag. For example, here's the top of this bag here. So at the very top, that's kind of the main color, and that counts as F in my pattern. We're gonna start here with the red, that's A, the orange orange is B, the pink is C, and then D, E. And then, of course, the gray again is F.

So whatever order you want those to be in, you will just assign what, you know, your color, a letter. So say we wanted those to be in like a spectrum kind of color, in a rainbow, like this. If this is how we wanted them to appear at the top of the bag, we would say A, B, C, D, E, and F. Okay? So that's what all that business is about in the pattern.

All those letters here. Right here, you can see I made a mistake when I first made this pattern. And square number eight, the very middle letter should be a B and not a C. And I'm not sure if that's uncorrected in your copy yet, but take a look for that and just go ahead and correct that. If it's a C, cross it out and put a B there.

All right, so we are gonna start by, oh, by looking at the chart, I'm gonna be working from the chart, because to me, I'm a very visual person and it really helps me to see this. But all of the instructions are all written out. If you don't like charts, that's fine. You don't need to use the chart if you don't want to. So let me just open this up here.

Here's our chart of our granny square. All of the symbols represent a stitch. We start in the center and we're gonna make four chains at the center. And then we're going to do a slip stitch, chain up, and then we start working around. And the reason these are different colors is just to help you visually separate one round from the next.

They're all worked with the right side facing. So let's start with, we're just gonna start with this as our first color. And you can follow your pattern. It'll tell you, you know, when you make each square, what color to start with. You know, we talked about the letters that'll tell you, you know, whether you start with A, B, C, D, or E.

And F is always the border on the outside. F will always be this single crochet border on the outside. All right, so we're gonna start by chaining four. One, two, three, four. And then we slip stitch into the very first chain that we did.

Doesn't even matter where you slip stitch into that stitch. So don't be super particular about it because you're gonna cover it up with stitches anyway. So you just yarn over and pull up a loop. And so you can see there's a little hole in the middle, and that's where we're gonna be working our first round of stitches. So we chain three.

One, two, three. Move this, maybe you can see a little more clearly. And now we're going to work two double crochets into that chain loop there. So we yarn over, insert our hook into the center, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over over, pull through two, yarn over, pull through two. We do that again.

Yarn over, insert your hook, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two, yarn over, pull through two. So this counts as like our first three double crochets. We're making double crochets in clusters of three in this granny square. And then we get to a corner, so we're gonna chain two. One, two.

And now we're gonna do another set of three double crochets. Yarn over, insert, yarn over, poke a loop. Yarn over, pull through two, yarn over, pull through two. That's one. And I'll do two more.

And I should mention too, you know, this is a live event, so if you have any questions for me, if anything that I'm doing is not clear, please jump in to the comments and ask me. I would love to hear from you. All right, so let's see. We have someone from YouTube saying, "Hello, this is such a cute bag, can't wait to crochet this. Thank you for your tutorial." You're welcome.

I'm glad that you like it too. And viewing on YouTube, she says, or he says, I don't know, "It looks like a fun, pretty, easy project. Thank you for the pattern." You're welcome. Thank you for saying that. All right.

And then we've gotten to the corner. So we did two chains, and we're gonna do another set of three, double crochets. One, two, three. Two more chains, and then another set of three double crochets. One.

Two. Three. And then we're at another corner and we're gonna do two more chains. And then we slip stitch into the top, into the third chain that we did at the very beginning. And you can slip stitch however you like.

You know, you could go under, normally when we work to stitches, we go underneath those that V at the top. But for this particular project, I just like to slip stitch into the back loop and underneath that bottom bump. So basically, and you know this, it doesn't matter how you do it, this just looks clean to me and it's easy to do. I just put my finger behind and go straight down into the center of that V, yarn over and pull your loop and pull it through the loop on your hook, just like that. And then we're gonna cut our yarn.

Leave yourself a little bit of a tail so you can cover that up as you go. And then we're just gonna fasten off like that, pull on it. Okay? So then we're gonna start with our next color. We're gonna be working round two.

So there's lots of different ways to join yarn. There's lots of different ways to make a granny square. This is what's working for me on this particular project, is to just make your slip knot. So I make my slip knots like this. You can do it however you like.

I flip it over and then I put my crochet hook underneath that center part there, make a slip knot. And then I start with that on my hook. And then I insert my hook right here, yarn over and pull it up to join it. Okay? So that's how I anchor my next color.

Then I like to swing my yarn tail over here and hold these two yarn tails. If you're newer at this, you don't need to worry about this because this is just one more thing to hang onto. But if you have crocheted for a while and you feel more comfortable holding the yarn in the hook, just move those two over there and then you can crochet around them a little bit. In this particular project, because it's fully lined on the inside, I don't mind having little floats across the back and it helps me when I'm weaving in my ends to not have to weave them in quite so much later. And there's a lot of ends because there's a lot of colors.

So we're gonna chain three, here we are on the chart. We're gonna chain three and do two more double crochets. This counts as three double crochets into that first loop where we joined. So we do one, two, three. And then we're gonna do two double crochets.

One. Two. See how I'm working over that yarn tail there? I'm gonna gonna just kind of bury that. Then I pull my yarn tails downward just a little, so they're kind of behind that.

And then I'm gonna skip all the way across here into the next chain space. And I'm gonna do crocheting around those yarn tails. I'm gonna do three double crochets. One. Two.

Three. And then chain two. And three more double crochets here. One. Two.

Three. Every time you get to the chain two corner of your granny square, you're gonna do a series of three double crochets, chain two, three double crochets, and that creates another corner. So then you skip across those three double crochets, and you're gonna do exactly the same thing. Three double crochets, chain two, three double crochets. One.

Two. Three. Chain two, and then three more double crochets. One. Two.

Three. Then we're gonna skip across to this corner. Same thing, three double crochets, chain two, three double crochets. One, two, three. Chain two.

One, two. And three more double crochets. One. Two. Three.

Okay, and now we have reached our first corner. So we're gonna do a set of three double crochets, chain two, and then we're gonna join. So I'm just gonna drop this yarn that I've been carrying along. You can see I carried it here, here, and here. And you can sort of tighten this up.

And then if that makes it cup, you can stretch it and loosen it. This is something that you can play with. And like I said before, if you don't wanna mess around with those yarn tails, it's totally okay to just leave 'em hanging on the back of your work and you can weave 'em in later. Not a problem at all. All right, so we're gonna do three double crochets in that very first chain where we join this color.

So there's our one, two, three. Chain two. And then we're gonna slip stitch in the top chain of that chain three and fasten off. So we cut your yarn, leaving a few inches. Fasten off, just like that.

Okay? And then we're gonna add our third color. We'll do pink this time. So I'll do this a little faster so you can see what it looks like. But we're basically doing the exact same thing, making a slip knot here.

I'm going to pick up a loop and pull through to anchor my yarn. Swing my yarn tails over so I'm crocheting over them. Chain three. One, two, three. And then three double crochets.

Well, actually, the first chain three counted as a double crochets. So we do two more double crochets, skip across these double crochets, go into the next space between. There's no chains there, but there is a space between. Here, let me show you. A space between these three double crochets and these three double crochets.

And that's where you put your next cluster of three double crochets. Okay? And then you skip to the next space between your double crochet clusters, and that's a corner. So remember, the corner is three double crochets, chain two, three double crochets. And we have a question from Lisa Braco.

She is wondering if we can make the bag longer, so it can be a tote bag. Sure, you can. You can just do maybe another set of six granny squares. Let me pull this in here. So instead of putting this border on after you get this all stitched together, and I'll show you how to do that later, you can do another set of six granny squares up here.

Sorry, I'm gonna be, looking at that upside down might be confusing. Okay, so here's your bag, and then you can do six more granny squares up here at the top, and then you can put this on. And that would be, you know, a pretty good sized tote bag actually. And you can add straps and handles or whatever you like. All right, so we're at the corner and we're gonna go to our next space between double crochets, and that's right here, right there in that spot.

So we'll do three double crochets in there. One. Two. Three. And we'll skip to the next corner.

One. Two. Three. Chain two because it's a corner. And then we're gonna do another set of three double crochets.

One. Two. Whoops, I didn't pull it through my last stitch there. Two. Three.

Okay, then we skip to the next space between double crochets and do another cluster of three double crochets. One, two, three. Oh, Christine says, "Great instruction. You're easy to follow. I'm a beginner.

Can't wait to gather my yarn and make it later next week." Awesome, Christine. Thank you so much for saying that. I really appreciate that. That was very nice of you. And Cindy says, "I love granny squares.

They're so versatile." So true, you can do a lot of things with granny squares, and I have lots of ideas. All right, so we've made our next corner here, we're gonna skip to that space between our double crochets. And we'll do one, two, three. More double crochets there. We made it back to our first corner that we worked into, and we're gonna complete that by doing three double crochets, chain two, and slip stitch.

So just remember there's no, the only place on the granny square is that, this particular granny square, it's different with other, you know, some other granny squares are different, but on this particular granny square, there's no chains between your double crochet clusters unless you're at a corner. And then there's those two chains. All right, so we're going to slip stitch in here, and then we're going to cut our yarn and fasten off. Okay, and if you're making a granny square, you can just keep going and going and going forever and make a giant blanket if you want to. You just, in this method, you just keep adding more stitches and more stitches as you go around.

But for this particular project, you're just gonna do one more round of these double crochet clusters so that it looks like this. You know, you'll be, this time, instead of just having one space to put that group of double crochets into, you're gonna have two places to put clusters of double crochets into. But otherwise, this round is exactly the same. You just do three double crochets, chain two, three double crochets at each corner. And then any space, any gap between those clusters, you do three double crochets on your way.

So then you're gonna fasten that off just like we have been. And then you're gonna work the last round, which is just a single crochet border. Let's see, I'll do this in purple. So it looks a little different than the gray. You can do a slip stitch and add that slip stitch to your hook, join your yarn just like we've already been doing.

So you've got your slip stitch, grab that yarn, pull through. And then we're gonna chain one. That's gonna count as the first single crochet of your round. So right now we're working from the chart and we're starting right here and we're going to be working. See how there's a chain stitch right there?

That counts as the very first stitch of your round. And then you're gonna be working single crochets all the way around. Every time you get to a corner, you're going to do four single crochets. And they're just worked into that chain space. They're not actually worked into each chain.

I mean, you could do that if you wanted to, but it takes longer. And I like to do it this way. It looks a little neater to me. So we have the first chain counts as a single crochet. We just did a single crochet.

Wait, let me back up and talk about what a single crochet is in case you haven't done those before. You're gonna insert your hook into that same chain space, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two. That's a single crochet. And now we're gonna work a single crochet into each stitch across, including the top of this turning chain here. This was that chain three.

So just insert your hook, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two. Insert, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two. Okay, we're just gonna continue making single crochet stitches all the way across, one into every stitch. And I am still working over my yarn tails like I had been before. You don't have to do that.

If that's too tricky, just skip that, let 'em dangle back there, and then you can have lots of extra practice weaving in your ends. That's not a punishment. It's good for you. All right, so you're gonna single crochet all the way across, and then when you get to that chain two space on the corner, you're gonna do four single crochets right into that corner, okay? So one.

Two. Three. Four. Got four single crochets right in that corner there. And then you're gonna continue making, don't miss this first stitch, but you're gonna continue making single crochets into each stitch all the way across.

Just like that. So we're gonna make this single crochet border around each square as we complete it. That's always gonna be in color F, which I think of as the main color. But really those no main color in this bag, I guess. All right, we've reached the next corner.

Let's see, says, "I like the tighter square. I usually put one chain between the threes on the sides and three chains out the corners." Yes, I have done them that way before too. And for this particular project, I didn't want it to be that just, when there's more chains in between your stitches, it makes it a little bit looser and there's a little more gap between your each stitch or you know, clumps of stitches. And I was trying to make it look a little more solid for this particular project. But like I said, there's lots of different ways to make granny squares and they are all lovely.

So you're just gonna continue working this border all the way around, putting your four single crochets into the corners. When you get around to this corner, you're just gonna slip stitch into that first chain that we did and fasten off. I'm just gonna fasten off here and then I'm gonna show you the next step. After you've created all eight of your squares, you're going to lay them all out and my pattern will tell you what order I laid mine out in, which you can follow along if you were using the same color changes I was, then it'll look similar to mine, even if your colors are different. But you can see on this pattern, this is showing you the six that go around the top of the bag.

They're all laid out here. This is A, B, C, D, E, F, or square, one, two, three, four, five, six. Sorry, squares one through six at the top, and then seven and eight are down here. So you're gonna sew them. Oh, I should mention, when you fasten off this last color, leave yourself a good 12 to 18, maybe 18 inches of a yarn tail, because you're gonna use that for seaming.

Then you don't have to add more yarn to it. So you're going to seam them all together and then seam them into a loop so that you have, you can see right here, that's a loop. All six of those are together in a loop shape. I'm gonna show you how to do the seaming. If you have a different seeming method that you prefer, that's absolutely fine, you can do whatever you like.

I'm just gonna show you what I used. So I laid 'em all out. When I laid them all out, I had all the yarn tails going up at the same corner. I put all the yarn tails on the upper right corner as I was looking at it. It just helps to kinda organize it and make sure that you have a yarn tail sticking out of your granny square at a spot where it's gonna help you so you can sew.

All right, I'm gonna tilt it this way. Whoops, here, we'll sew it to the single crochet. So when you steam them together, you can just do a whip stitch and you're gonna be stitching through. You can go through both loops of each piece like that. And I'm starting with, if you take a look at this, I am starting with this stitch right here.

So you have these two and they belong to this side, and these two belong to this side. These two single crochets belong to this side. And we'll use the those later. Okay? So these two single crochets, they belong to this side.

So we're starting in the middle basically of those four single crochets. So you just put your needle underneath the two loops, the Vs, just like that, and just do a whip stitch all the way across. And because I chose to do that last round in the same color for each square, this whip stitch is really not gonna show. If you're using the same color as you used for your border, then it's not gonna show. Not to say that seeing that seam is bad, because I actually kind of like it.

I sort of like that patchworky kind of aesthetic. But I was trying to make it so that, you know, even if you didn't have the neatest of seams, it would just blend right in and you wouldn't see it. So you're just gonna do a whip stitch all the way across your , for your, you know, connecting all of your squares into a tube. Well, all six of your squares I should say. And then you're gonna connect the bottom two squares into, you know, in between.

Then... So you can see here's the six in a round, there's the bottom two. Then you're going to sew the bottom two onto the bottom of the bag. So let me show you what that looks like. Ooh, put your sunglasses on for this hot pink, you guys.

That's a fun color. Let's see. I'm just checking to see if there's any more questions. "This is worth my time. I don't like crocheting over the tails.

They're always visible along the top of previous rows. But you are chaining over the tails in the back of the work." Yeah, you just sort of have to pull 'em down a little bit. Yeah. See, you know, that's kind of like a trial and error thing to see if it works for you. And Tommy says, "Love granny squares.

Can't wait to make 'em. Thank you for the tutorial." You are welcome. I'm glad you're here. All right, so this is what your bag will look like when you have your six squares stitched together into this loop. Here, let me show you.

There's the other three back there. Imagine this is not here yet. Just imagine that away. Then you're going to seem these two squares to the bottom. Now, leaving this open here.

Okay? So you'll lay your piece, you're gonna match up the edge of this with the center of the square above, same with this side. See how it's offset? You're not matching, you're not putting it underneath two squares. You're making one of these squares a center square basically.

And then you're gonna put these two underneath, matching 'em up in this way. So you're just gonna whip stitch all the way across, just like how I showed you to do, and you'll do that again for the opposite side. Now, it might seem kind of weird to leave it like this, but at this point you're gonna leave this open because we need this open in order to draft our lining. Draft sounds scary. So just scribble out our lining on our fabric.

It's really easy, I promise. So then after you've got these pieces all put together, you can add this onto it. So that, let me show you how to start crocheting around the top of your squares. Here's a little sample that I made. This is just sort of a reduced sample of what you're doing, what you're gonna be doing.

So imagine this is right here, and imagine this is a big loop, okay? You're going to pull up a loop of your yarn and this would be, you're gonna be using the same color, that F color as you would. Like for example, if this was my bag, I'd be using this turquoise color so it won't show if anything's a little bit messy or not quite in the right spot, you'd be using turquoise. But I'm gonna use a different color right now just so that you can a little bit better see what I'm doing. Let's see, I'm gonna use the yellow.

I think that'll show up a little better. Okay, so you will just insert your hook into that square. This is the side seam here, and you're gonna insert it right there. There should be two single crochets accessible here. One, two.

Those are the two that I was talking about before at the corner that we can still work into. So we're going to insert our hook, pull up a little loop of yarn to start and then make a chain. And then in the same place where we already pulled up our loop, we're gonna insert our hook, pull up a loop and pull through two to do a single crochet. Okay? And if you want to, you can use a stitch marker there to keep track of your rounds.

We're going to, then you're just gonna make a single crochet into each stitch around the entire top of your bag. And again, this is with F. This is the same color as you used for that last round of single crochet stitches and used to whip stitch everything together. It should be the same color unless you wanna go rogue and do it your own way, which I totally applaud. That is completely fine.

I mean this granny squares are such a great way to use up scraps. You know, I don't want anyone to feel like you can't just, you know, do it any any way you like. Grab any color you like, 'cause you can. All right, so we've worked a single crochet into each of those single crochets from the corner. And then we are going to find the next two single crochets.

There's one there and there's one there. It may seem like there's kind of a gap here. That's because we did our seam there. It's a little bulky, but it's okay. It'll all close in once you do your next single crochet right there.

Okay? So that's how you go across your seams. Just look for those single crochet stitches in the corner. There should be two in each corner and you're gonna single crochet into each stitch in between. All right?

And we have, you know, imagine we've gone all the way around all six of those squares and we're coming back to the beginning. So this is our last single crochet and we're going to slip stitch into the first single crochet of the round just like this to pull those two close together. And then we will do a yarn over to change to whatever your, let's see, it would be E in this pattern or whatever the bottom stripe you wanted to make. So here we go. So this blue line is the next one we're gonna be doing.

We just did this gray line right here. I mean I know it's yellow and it doesn't match the turquoise, but technically the next row is going to be the bottom of your, basically your stripe, of your rainbow stripe. So we're going to, in order to change color, we are going to just yarn over with a new color, pull it through and then we just pull on the old color like this until it disappears to nothing. Just pull it nice and tight. And you may need to, you know, pull on that again later.

That's fine. So we're gonna do a chain one. And in this particular, in this pattern that does not count as a stitch for this section. You're just chaining one. And then you're going to make a single crochet into that same stitch that we did our slip stitch into the very same stitch.

And you can crochet over some, some yarn ends here if you like. I like to do that. So we're gonna do a single crochet into that very same stitch that we did our slip stitch into. And we're gonna just continue working around. And the reason that we're joining and joining at the end of each round is because I like to have a nice clean color change.

So you can see there's our next line of color there. I like to have a clean color change. I'll show you what it looks like where all the joins are. Here they are. You can see them but they're not as noticeable as if you just started crocheting with a different color and you were working in a spiral.

So here's all the joins right there along that edge. So you're going to just continue doing your single crochet rounds. You'll work through all of the colors that you've picked out and you're gonna end with that F color once again at the top. And then you'll have a piece that really does look like this. And then at that point, that's when you can draw up your lining.

So your lining, like I said before, it's best if it's out of something that's maybe a little heavier duty, but it does happen to fit in a fat quarter if you're wondering, 'cause that's kind of fun to get really cool prints. But one thing to think about when you are picking out your fabric, you can kind of see through this fabric a little bit. Here, let me move this back, show you the, what it looks like. You wanna choose something that's not gonna have a pattern or a lot of different color changes 'cause it's gonna show through a little bit and it's gonna be kind of distracting from the outside. So if you are just in love with using a pattern for the inside of your lining, you can do that, but you'll have to flat line two pieces of fabric together.

Now, if that's kind of a scary word, all flat lining means is you just lay two layers of the fabric together and you just stitch them together around the outside and that way you can end up with a piece that like this, I actually did it for this piece, which we'll be working with in a little bit. I wanted this to be on the inside of my bag and I wanted to have something light so that you could see what I was doing in this video when I sew this in. But I really wanted something dark on the outside because the dark color, it just seems to fade away and then I don't notice it through the little holes in the granny square. So if you want to, you can flatline your pieces together. So that would mean you just tray, you lay your two pieces out and then you fold them in half.

So this is my piece folded in half. Here's the folded edge here. And you're going to lay this piece down on top of it just like that. You're matching up the two folded edges at the bottom, okay? And you wanna make sure that you have enough space everywhere and you're just gonna trace around it.

Because I'm using a black fabric, I'm gonna be using my Sharpie. So be careful when you do this 'cause it's a permanent marker. And actually before you do the step, if you want to, you could steam it to, to block it. Wet blocking acrylic doesn't really do a whole lot. I really love steaming my acrylic things because it like softens when it gets hot, it softens your yarn a little bit and then it kind of forms into what you want it to be, you know, nice and flat.

Your stitches will look more even, but you can skip that step for this particular project, if you really hate blocking. It's really not, it makes a little bit of a difference, but you don't need to worry about the drape because you actually want a stiffer thing. Anyway. So you're just gonna trace all the way around this piece. You're just tracing a line.

Trace in that little notch there. Be careful not to draw on your table. You're gonna trace all the way across the top. And you know what, you could be smart about this and use a ruler. I just skipped that step because I can eyeball a straight line pretty well.

But feel free to whip out that ruler or a straight edge or piece of paper or something to help you. You can also kind of rough in this particular, you know, all the lines and then go in later and kind of clean 'em up if you like. But this is just a lining and this fabric is kind of, you know, squishy. So to me, it didn't really seem to make that big a difference. All right, so then you remove your crochet fabric and you have a kind of a weird looking capital T shape here.

And then you're just gonna cut that out with a quarter inch seam allowance all the way around. And probably use bigger scissors than tailor points, which is what I'm using. Let's see, here's my bigger scissors. I forgot I brought these for this. Okay, so even though the top we're going to be folding down a half an inch, you're still gonna add that quarter inch seam allowance or you know, like a little bit of extra along there.

So you'll just be cutting this out. Remember, that fold has to be at the bottom or this is not gonna work. So when you have your piece all cut out, first thing you're gonna do is you're going to seam along the two side seams, okay? So you can use your, you're gonna draw, you're gonna seam right on your drawn on, that's your stitching line, that drawing, the marking that you did that, that'll be your stitching line. So you're just going to do a straight stitch here and also on this side as well.

And after you've done that, that'll look like this. Here's another version of it. So this has been stitched here with that little seam allowance and it's been stitched here also. And then here's the magical part. You're going to sew this.

This is basically like you just open it up and match the edge of your drawing where your drawing starts to that seam. And then you're going to just pin your piece like this. And you're gonna seem across here all the way across with a quarter inch seam allowance. I mean you can draw this in if it helps you. I'm just gonna eyeball it 'cause that's good enough for me.

And I'm gonna show you, if you've never hand stitched like this before, I will. Sorry, I was having a little tangle there. I will show you how to do a sea. I think this will be a, we're gonna do a back stitch here. This will be a little bit stronger than just doing a running stitch through.

Really, I think, the easiest is if you are a sewing machine sewer, is to just do it that way. But if you are not, okay, so we took one little stitch, sorry, I should explain what I'm doing. You're gonna go back about halfway, put your needle in and it's gonna come back out. See how your thread came out here? You put your needle in.

Your needle is always gonna be facing from right to left or from left to right if you are a lefty. And you don't need to be using this thick a thread, but I did that because I was hoping you'd be able to see it a little bit better. So there's another little stitch. It's like that, just sew your way across. So on this side it just looks like little stitches.

On this side, see how they're overlapping? That'll just make it a little bit stronger. So you can continue all the way across. I mean you can do this theme, this exact same theme for these seams as well if you don't have a sewing machine. I just wanted to demonstrate on this little part here so you could see how I put it together or how you could put it together if you were hand sewing.

So then once you get over here to the end, you're just gonna tie your knot and then clip your thread. And because this is going to be hidden on the inside of your bag, you don't need to worry too much about yarn tails and weaving 'em in and that sort of thing. But I don't like, I don't ever like to cut my yarn tails. I mean your thread tales, I'm talking about the wrong thing. Okay, so I don't ever like to cut my thread too close to the knot because it's just seems like it's going to unravel.

But having a little bit like that is fine just hanging out there because it's going to be hidden inside of your crochet piece anyway. All right, so you'll get those two, this seamed, and then you'll do the same thing with the other corner. Right here, you'll open that up, stitch it across and you will end up, you know, with the nice bag shape. Here, I'll show you my finished lining here. Here's the one that I flatline those two pieces together so you can see.

So this is what it looks like on the inside, like that. And then on the outside, you've got these seams on the corners. So that's a really easy way to, to make yourself lining to have this piece. And the reason we didn't sew these closed yet is so that we could have it nice and flat and make our lining. So after you've done that, then you can do the same kind of seams on your crochet piece.

So let me do that again. So you just, this is the coroner, you just kind of open that up and then you whip stitch these seams closed here, here and here. So then you can finally finish your, the crochet part of your bag. So then after you do that, it's time to put the zipper in. Don't run away.

I know people are scared of zippers and I understand zippers can be very frustrating when you're first learning how to do them, but we're gonna talk about it and it's gonna be fine. It's not as hard as you think. So for this particular project, you'll, after you finish crocheting your piece, you're gonna go by your zipper and oftentimes your zipper's not gonna be exactly the perfect length that you want it to be. That's okay 'cause we can shorten a zipper. It doesn't matter if the zipper is separating zipper, which means when you unzip it, the two pieces completely come apart, or non-separating, which means you unzip it and then the bottom stays together.

We will make, either way, we're going to, we want a non-separating zipper, but we will just make our own with a separating zipper, which is what I have here. So the way that we do that is we just close the zipper and you can go to the fabric store and you can get a little metal piece to, like a zipper end to put on around the teeth. But I just skip that and I just do it with thread. So you're going to lay your zipper down, figure out how long you want it to be. You put the bag on top of it and mark off where you want the zipper to end.

So I want the zipper to end about right here. And we're just going to use a needle and thread and stitch a zipper stop at the bottom here. This is a bottom stop. So all you need to do is just stitch it a bunch of times, okay? And if you...

If you imagine when you're unzipping this zipper, you're probably not gonna be super careful every time you're looking through your bag 'cause you're excited about your project. You want this to be nice and strong so it's not gonna pop apart. If you have a much longer zipper, like if you're cutting off, you know, more than this amount, you can actually just cut through your zipper, just snip right through it. Actually, I can show you that on the zipper because even though it doesn't really need to be cut 'cause it's not very long, I'll still show you how to do it. If you're cutting through your zipper...

Here, another thing, after you do your stop, I like to come over here and do a second stop right behind it because I feel like that just helps keep it a little bit more sturdy. It's not relying on just that one point of tension to keep the zipper together at the bottom. All right, so I'm gonna tie that off. And cut my thread. So if you were cutting your zipper, say the zipper was quite a bit longer, you could just cut through the teeth, you just cut along here.

Maybe I should use my craft scissors. Use your craft scissors, Brenda, not your nice scissors. Okay, so you can just cut your piece and like, you know, if you were cutting, if you had a longer piece, you would probably leave a little more space, like maybe a quarter inch or a little more half inch even, or even an inch beyond what you just stitched 'cause this seems like a little bit short to me, but I just wanted to show you you can just cut right through that. And then you can use your lighter. Oh.

My lighter doesn't wanna work right now. Let's see, I'll try one more time. Okay, I tested this lighter earlier, so to make sure it worked and it doesn't, but you just use your lighter, your better lighter than mine, and then you just put the flame next to the tape. You don't want it to be by your cotton thread. So you need it like a little longer space, and you melt your tape.

And what that does is it'll keep it from fraying. If you don't have that, that's actually okay for this particular project because it's going to be hidden inside of your lining anyway. It's just an extra step. All right, so to pin your zipper into your piece, you can fold your zipper tape and actually you can fold it either way because it's gonna have a lining covering this up so it doesn't actually matter. But you're gonna put your zipper all the way up to that fold and you're pinning it from the right side so you can see what you're doing, pin it from the side where you can see the zipper.

And then we're gonna put this end, you know, find that little fold on the edge. That's where we're going to put this. So here's the folded edge, just pin your zipper in. I'm pinning right above where I stitched, just like that. Okay?

And then you can pin the rest of this. Let's see, start in the middle. And you wanna pin, you're pinning through your fabric into your zipper tape and you wanna make sure there's a little gap between your fabric and your teeth. Because if there isn't, if it's really close, then you are gonna get your zipper caught in the teeth all the time and it's going to start ripping out your, well, it'll actually, it might wreck your zipper, but it also will make it get stuck and that'll be very frustrating. So just make sure there's a little gap probably about, I don't know, an eighth of an inch at least.

You can test it out by pinning it and then opening and closing your zipper just to make sure it can clear all of that. Let's see. Oh, Caroline says, "If you flatline, you could sew the right sides together, turn inside out so your seams are in between." Yes, you could definitely do that. That's a good idea. "How did you sew together your flatline fabric so that the printed material is folded over the top?" Ooh, thank you Keisha for asking that.

I forgot to mention. This is only just, here's my fabric, I just flatlined it together with like at a quarter of an inch on that line there. And then I pressed the edge. This is actually in your instructions, to press the edge a half an inch over. Okay, so it's not actually stitched here.

Thank you for asking that 'cause that would've been confusing. It's not actually stitched, it's just this is a raw edge right here. This stitching is just from my flat lining right here. That's all that is. And then I pressed it a half an inch just to prep it, to put it into my, into my bag.

All right, so let's see. And all right, so we've got that all pinned and then you're gonna wanna pin the other side as well. So for this, you kind of open your zipper at this point to pin the other side, it can make it easier, but I like to get at least a few points pinned while the zipper is together because it helps me see if the squares are distributed okay. Like for example, if this side is not attached to the zipper, you don't know exactly where this needs to go, 'cause we can take a look at this when we're pinning our zipper and make sure that our seams here are in a similar place to that side. So we'll just get a couple of pins in and then we'll unzip it and take a look at it and we can kind of fix things if they're not quite right.

So just remember, we're still pinning an eighth of an inch away from those teeth. You wanna keep the teeth out of it. Okay? So we're gonna unzip it and just check, see how we did, looks pretty good. Gonna add one more pin in here.

This looks a little close. I think I need to just scooch that out just a little bit. All right, so let's take a look at this part right here. This is where the two zipper ends are. You can fold them both back like this and stitch them.

Or, what I like to do is I like to just let one of them come across to the other side because I feel like that, you can even overlap them both like that if you want to. But I like to have this continuous tape going all the way around the top edge because I feel like it gives a little extra structure to this part. Otherwise, there might be more tension on just this fabric, just the crocheting fabric here at this point. So I let my zipper tape just go over to the side. All right, so once you have that all pinned in.

I'm teaching. Let's see. Cindy says, "Thanks for that tip for the zipper." Okay, you're welcome. And Tyson says, "I'm teaching my friend to crochet. Do you have tips on teaching someone to crochet and how long should the lessons be to teach someone to crochet?" That's a good question.

I feel like it so depends on the person. If your friend, for example, some of my friends are kids, my children, then the lessons need to be a little shorter for their attention span. It just depends on the person. Tips on teaching someone to crochet, I would say find out what they're interested in making and begin by doing something really easy, like a dish cloth, but have in mind what they actually want to be making so you can make it fun for them to think about, you know, the possibilities of what's to come once they learn stuff. Okay, so when you've got your zipper all pinned into the top of your bag, you're going to start stitching and you're gonna be looking at the outside of your work.

You need to make sure you are catching the zipper tape, but you don't have to care if it looks super perfect or not. And let's begin. We'll go through, actually we'll start at the top of the zipper. So we'll just start by pushing our, we'll start where it overlaps so we anchor both sides at once. So we're putting our needle through all of those thicknesses.

And we're going to do a back stitch. So we're gonna stitch, put our needle down and back up. And what we're aiming for here, let's see, we are trying to put our needle right through here. Maybe you can see this needle a little better, a little better. It's underneath this V and we're basically stitching around the posts of all these single crochet stitches around the top.

All right, so you'll go back a little bit and then go forward. You're going through all the thicknesses there. And when you do this, you know, your thread, you could even use a contrasting color thread probably, and probably it's not gonna show your thread. It doesn't really matter too much what color it is because you are pulling it down into the yarn. The yarn is kind of gonna, it's gonna cover that up.

It's fluffy and it's going to cover up what you're doing. So you don't have to worry about your stitches being super perfect. They really don't need to be super perfect here. So I'm going back, taking a stitch back and going past where my thread was, taking small, small enough stitches that your zipper's gonna hold. So about one stitch for every, let's see, one stitch for every crochet stitch maybe, or maybe two stitches for every crochet stitch.

That's probably more accurate. All right, so I'll show you what it looks like on the back. See, it looks like one big line of stitching. It doesn't have to be super beautiful back there, but you just need to make sure that you are catching your zipper. Just like that.

So you'll continue stitching all the way around your piece, even across here. When you get to this end, you can continue even stitching. Let me tuck that in there. You can continue stitching all the way across here. You're gonna have to go underneath or above that, all that plastic, you know, the zipper, the actual zipper, but you can stitch this end of the fabric down.

So you're just gonna go all the way around and I'll cut this off, finish it later. So your piece will look like this. Look, the zipper changed color. Magic! All right, so see, it's not super perfect or anything.

And this zipper tape actually was super narrow. So I had, I don't have a lot of space here between the edge of the zipper, but you do wanna have some space between the teeth of the zipper and your stitching line, because you are going to put your fabric just right up above that and stitch it in the fabric from your lining. So I'm gonna show you how to do that. And we're getting very close to the end here. I'm gonna tuck the lining inside.

And you'll just see how that folded edge there just goes in between. And you're gonna be covering up your zipper, just like this. So you'll get that all pinned in, and you wanna make sure that you are putting that line, that folded line very close to your stitching line, like ever so slightly above your stitching line. You're gonna cover up your stitching line with the lining, but you wanna make sure that you have enough space above it that your stitches are not going to be interfering with the zipper teeth or you're not gonna see them from the outside of your bag. Okay?

So you'll get that, your lining will evenly distributed through the inside of your bag, pinning it all the way around. Let me see here. See how much more structure it has? It already wants to just kind of stay up by itself. And then we're going to stitch the lining into the bag, and I'll just do a little short sample so you can see how I do that.

All right, so I have my thread with a little knot in it. You can start anywhere you like. And I'm going to push my needle up from a little bit from the back so my knot ends up on the back of my work. I tuck my thread in there, and then you can just take tiny little stitches. You know, they don't, this is probably like 3/16th of a stitch or something.

3/16th of an inch or something close to that. Somewhere between an eighth of an inch and a quarter of an inch. But your tiny little, you're not taking a big bite out of your lining at all. You're just taking a teeny little, teeny little stitch right there. Let me move this pin so you can see.

So you go in here, catch the zipper, and if you're extra good, you can catch a little bit of the crochet fabric. And then you come out right here. See how these are making these teeny little, teeny tiny little stitches? You can also do a slip stitch where you are just sliding your needle. So now it's in the zipper.

And then you can slide it through the edge of the fabric, like a little hidden stitch there. You can slide it through your fabric and back out. I find it's easier to do just that little tiny stitch. And if you're using a thread color that actually matches, then you wouldn't really be able to see that little tiny bit there. All right, so I'll do two more stitches and then you can see.

So you're just gonna be doing those tiny little stitches from the outside. This is what you see from the inside. This is what you see, and it looks lovely. You can't see any of that messy zipper stitching that I did earlier. It's all hidden in between.

And the fabric gives it a nice amount of body so that it's nice and thick. And then the last thing to do after you get your lining all stitched in is you're gonna make this little pompom if you want, little tiny pompom. So in order to do that, you will cut a longer piece of yarn about 20 inches long, fold it in half, and make a little knot about an inch and a half away from this folded edge, okay? That is gonna help you secure your pompom to the zipper. If you have a zipper, I should say this only works if you have a zipper with a little tiny hole in the pole.

Like this is as small as it could be. This zipper had a nice big pole, so it's easier to put it through. And then you're gonna take five or six or however many colors of yarn you wanna use. Or you can even just do one color of yarn and then you have to wrap it five times as many times as I say in the pattern. But we'll just say, let's see.

Oops. That's attached. One more here. All right, so imagine this is, imagine this is five different colors of yarn, even though it's secretly four. You're gonna take your cardboard piece and you're gonna wrap it around 15 times.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Okay, and then you can cut that. And you will need actually two more strands of yarn. I forgot to cut these about 10 inches long or so. You could just eyeball that.

And then you can use that to tie the center of your pompom. So you just slide that under. And then you're gonna tie a nice tight knot right here. Going in the center, tie a nice tight knot over here. And there's actually lots, many different techniques, techniques you can use to make pompoms.

This is just my favorite way to do it without a pompom maker. I feel like it is easy enough and almost everybody has a little piece of cardboard at home. So once you get both sides tied like that, then you can slide your piece off of your cardboard and keep those two tied areas in the middle. And then you're going to use the piece that you made the little loop in. Make sure that loop is nice and tight, not gonna slip.

And then you're going to tie that around the center. And when you're trying to tie a really tight knot, it seems to help if you spin it once or twice, unless you have a buddy who can put their finger right in that middle for you. All right, so you make that knot nice and tight. And then at this point, you can cut open all of your loops. And you have to make sure, maybe put that extra loop that you made, put that on your finger so you know which one it is.

And you don't accidentally cut it, 'cause that would be sad, sad, sad. All right. So you cut all these bits open. And this is looking a little sad 'cause I used one less color, but also, you need to give your pompom a decent haircut, cut off all those extra bits. Basically, you just need to trim it down until it is a cute little ball.

All right, so this maybe isn't the most smooth pompom, but you get the idea. So take your time and make a very cute little ball. And then you can use this little loop to fasten it to your zipper. So you might be wondering how you do that. I'm gonna show you this zipper.

If you... Actually, I'm gonna show you on the zipper, that's trickier, because you might have this question. If you have a zipper that has a smaller hole like this, but you can still get two strands of yarn through it, even if it's tight, you can make a little loop of thread, put both ends through your zipper, through that little hole in the zipper. And then you've got this bigger loop. Oops, I forgot.

You gotta put this through here first. Whoops. All right. So you put your thread through the loop in your yarn, then you're gonna put the two ends through the zipper. I bet you're wondering how I was gonna do that magic.

Okay, so then you can just pull this right through, pull that through the hole in your zipper, and then you can get rid of the thread. And then you just have to stuff your cute little pompom through that hole like that. And it's attached. Ta-da! Super cute.

All right, let me just check and make sure I didn't miss any questions really quick. If you have any, you better get 'em in now. All right. "How many squares all together for this?" Eight, yes, there are eight squares all together, two on the bottom, and six around kind of the mid-section. Let's see, kids ask, "What type of stitching is it?" Ooh, I missed that part.

I wonder if that was when I was hand sewing. Let's see, to close the bottom crochet, would you... When I was hand sewing, you can do whatever stitch you like. I was doing a back stitch for most of what I was working on. "To close the bottom crochet, would you use a thread needle?" Oh, the bottom crochet.

You just use a yarn needle and yarn. Just how we were stitching all these pieces together with the whip stitch for right here, you don't need a thread, you just need yarn, yarn and your yarn tail or a yarn needle to stitch that closed. Just how you were stitching everything else. Okay, let's see. And Caroline says, "Great tutorial.

Brenda did a good job explaining. Thank you so very much." Thank you, Caroline. That was very nice of you to say. And we have lots of thank yous. Oh, you guys are so sweet.

Thank you, Mina. Thank you Darlene. And thank you AGSH1012. Thank you. And Mina asks, "How did you learn all these patterns?

I enjoy your tutorials." I just make these up. I don't know, I have lots of ideas, especially when it comes to granny squares. So I just wanna thank all of you guys so much for watching. Sorry, this one a little bit long, I just apparently had a lot to say, but I really enjoyed teaching you guys this project. And if you guys make this, I would love it, love it, love it if you would post pictures on social media, because I love to see what you guys do.

It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today.