Doily Purses

These are the three crochet purses I made in June that I'll donate to Bags of Love on Monday. This month I tried two different patterns. Both appear to have a doily-like pattern that's used as the purse flap.

I got the first pattern by following a video on YouTube. I watched the video, then wrote out the directions. But the directions were somewhat lacking. There's a chance the pattern was from somewhere other than the United States. The vocabulary of crochet is slightly different from country to country.

This is the purse I made while learning the pattern. I started with the purple, making the flap first. Then I moved on to making the body.

I was using up some skeins of yarn, so when I ran out of purple, I moved on to white yarn of equal weight to finish the purse body.

I added some purple back into the handle to help tie the colors/design together. The yarn was hefty enough that this purse didn't seem to require a lining.

For my second attempt with this pattern, I used a lighter weight yarn. The base is a "confetti" yarn. I made the flap in pink and added pink to the side seams. I made the handle out of the confetti yarn, too. 

Again, the directions for that doily were badly written, and I struggled with it. So to cover up some of the problems with the flap, and to further tie the doily flap to the body of the purse, I added a frill of confetti yarn to the edge of the doily. I'm quite pleased with that result. 

Since this yarn is lighter, I decided to line the purse with pink gingham fabric.

After that, I gave up on the poorly written directions and found a similar purse design. These directions were easy to follow.

Instead if making a half doily for the flap, the pattern calls for making a whole doily. Then you sew half of the doily to the back of the purse body. This was so much simpler!

After attaching the doily to the purse body, I added the pink frill to the front flap. For the handle, I doubled the yarn with one strand of confetti and one strand of pink. That made for a more sturdy handle.

I lined this purse with pink gingham fabric, too.

I may make one or more purses with this pattern again since I enjoyed it so much. Or I'll move on to a new pattern in July. I've found so many cute little girl crochet purse patterns to try, that I want to try them all!