Crochet
Crochet patterns and charity fundraising
February is a exciting month here at Crafternoon Treats. I’ve got lots of new crochet patterns and projects in the pipeline and lots of ideas for the lovely people who crochet along with me on Facebook in the Bagalong group and in The Crafternooners.
The bag of the month for February is the Romantic Night Out crochet evening bag, which you can make as sparkly as you want. That’s one of the new crochet patterns… the other is the asymmetric love heart which looks great as a bag charm on the bag but can also be worn as a brooch, attached to other bags or make several and string them together in garlands.
Valentine’s Day is coming up of course but I’ve done the red heart to mark this Friday, which is National Wear Red Day both here in the UK and in the USA. Its one of those ‘raising awareness’ days and its about heart disease. I thought it would be fun to make an asymmetric love heart in red and wear it on your bag on Friday. Even if you can’t wear red completely, or at all because of work rules, its shows you are taking part.
Fundraising with crochet patterns
I’ve been doing crochet patterns for Craftsy and Ravelry for a few months now, all priced at £1 ($1.50). I really love doing patterns and tutorials and my store on both sites contains some free patterns too. Downloads are growing steadily so I thought it would be a great month to do some fundraising with the new patterns I’ve just done.
50% of the income from the Romantic Night Out evening bag in the whole of 2016 will be donated to Marie Curie Cancer Care, via my Just Giving page. Its currently not too far short of £10,000 and I want to get it to that level in the next couple of months.
50% of the income from the asymmetric love heart in February 2016 will go to the British Heart Foundation to help fund heart disease.
About the new crochet patterns
The Romantic Night Out evening bag
The Romantic Night Out evening bag is a variation of my retro granny stash bag. I used a sparkly Red Heart yarn and King Cole Cosmos held together, but you can use any sparkly DK yarn (work with two strands of yarn together) or any dark aran yarn and King Cole Cosmos, or other metallic yarn with sequins.
The crochet pattern download includes how to make the squares, how to join the bag, how to make a simple felt lining and how to make and attached handles and a flap closure. You can make the bag bigger if you like by adding another round of two to each square. Its 16 pages in total – but you don’t have to print it all out. The square pattern is written on one page with UK terminology and on one page for US terminology. Print out the pattern page that matches the terms you normally use and then view the rest on your computer.
The Asymmetric Love Heart pattern
I love the heart motif and I love asymmetric hearts but I’ve not been able to find a pattern for one to crochet. So I had a play around and designed my own. It was quite tricky and so I’ve made the pattern pdf just containing the written crochet pattern and each one (the download includes a UK and a US version) links to its own online tutorial on my blog. This is not indexed here so is only accessible from the pattern. It has loads of photographs and shows how to make the asymmetric heart motif, step by step.
Once you have made a left-pointing heart and a right-pointing heart, you can join them together and stuff to get a lovely puffed heart. Perfect for adding to your evening bag as a charm decoration…
I hope you’ll join in the fundraising fun this month – and join in with the crochet-alongs xxxx If you don’t want to get the pattern yet, why not pin the image below onto your Pinterest – then you can find it again when you want 🙂
Pin for later
