flying dove crochet bag

About a month ago I helped a friend sort through her deceased friend's old handiwork supplies. She was kind enough to offer me any of the supplies I wanted in exchange for the help and support going through the boxes.

I went home with a bundle of wool yarns and vintage crochet and tatting threads. Beside the wonderful colors and packaging labels, I love these threads for small crochet projects like bean balls/hacky sacs for kids, necklaces, flowers, etc...things I can do while riding the bus into Seattle for work.

I also came home with a stack of vintage patterns and pamphlets. These you already know I love....
After scouring the pages, I found 2 projects I wanted to start right away.
One is this cool leaf shirt and skirt. I think I will make the skirt narrower and lower waisted, and in green, of course.

The other is a mash-up project inspired by this lattice crochet corner hankie:
and this lattice crochet bag (via the House that Lars Built)

I didn't like how the dove looked in the hankie pattern, though I liked the dove idea. I drew up a pattern on graph paper and started to crochet the bag "by the seat of my pants" (Adam is convinced I do everything by the seat of my pants...)

I was so anxious to begin the dove part that in hindsight I began it too early, resulting in the dove way down at the bottom of the bag. However, the most obvious problem here is that the dove doesn't even fit on one side of the bag...oops.

Also, in my unplanned haste, I failed to add some rounding to the bottom corners of the bag, so there are little points down there. I don't like how it looks at all. Adam's opinion of it is "Why did you make it all Grandma-y in pink?" Good point. my defense is that pink is the only color of which I had two balls and I didn't know how much it would take and didn't want to run out mid-project.

Anyway...before I even finished the first trial run, I started the second. I used orange thread and made the lattice squares 2X2 stitches instead of 3X3 stitches to give the bag more structure and prevent my items from falling out :)
I began the base with a few rows of single crochet stitches followed by a few rows of double crochet stitches to give the base more stability. I remembered to round the edges by increasing at the corners. So far it looks good; a little large, actually, but it will be a more useful bag that way, I suppose.

While making the first bag, I thought of all the fun things you can draw/write into your own graph paper pattern. I still like the dove, but I decided I also wanted to write Tree Peeps into the other side.
Updates to come!