Crochet Creations: Craft a Colorful Mandala Circle Bag | Lee Sartori | Skillshare
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Crochet Creations: Craft a Colorful Mandala Circle Bag

teacher avatar Lee Sartori, Crochet Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:31

    • 2.

      Start Your Mandala

      3:58

    • 3.

      Switch Colors

      4:11

    • 4.

      Stitch Your Flower

      4:17

    • 5.

      Add Dimension

      3:56

    • 6.

      Add Texture

      3:13

    • 7.

      Create the Purse Strap

      1:51

    • 8.

      Finish Your Bag

      1:21

    • 9.

      Final Thoughts

      0:56

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About This Class

With this eye-catching mandala crochet bag, your only limit is your imagination and your yarn supply!

What started out as a passion for making modern garments and adorable amigurumi brought crocheter Lee Santori more fun projects, cool opportunities, and career freedom than she could’ve imagined. Now between stitching up her favorite characters and new additions to her wardrobe, Lee makes crochet content for her 111K Instagram followers and guest hosts on the popular PBS Show Knit and Crochet Now. As the author of four crochet books, Lee enjoys sharing her love for turning a few skeins of yarn into a work of art that can be cherished for generations to come. 

With years of experience crafting and sharing her crochet creations, Lee can’t wait to guide you through the process of making your own daisy mandala circle bag. In the process, you’ll discover next-level crochet tools and techniques like making a color change mid-row, cluster stitches, and adding a liner to keep your smaller items secure.

With Lee as your teacher, you’ll:

  • Make your flower pop using seamless color changes
  • Add a little bit of texture by creating double crochet clusters
  • Create an adjustable, braided purse strap
  • Finish your bag by adding a sewn-in inner liner

Plus, Lee will provide a downloadable pattern and materials list so you can recreate and refine your mandala circle bag as many times as you’d like. 

Whether you’ve always wanted a crochet bag or you’re looking for a stylish new crochet project to refine some more advanced crochet skills, this mandala bag will help you master crisp color changes and textured stitches all while giving you a wearable work of art that is sure to be a conversation starter. 

A familiarity with beginner crochet skills including basic stitches and an understanding of crochet materials and crochet pattern reading is required to take this class. If any of this class feels beyond your skill level, check out this beginner’s crochet class with Toni Lipsey or try out another project from Lee’s full Crochet Learning Path. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Lee Sartori

Crochet Designer

Teacher

Lee Sartori is the crochet designer behind CoCo Crochet Lee. She can be seen as a guest host on Seasons 9 -11 of the popular PBS Show Knit and Crochet Now, as well as a cast member of Annie’s Creative Studio where she demonstrates fun crochet skills and patterns. Lee’s passion is designing modern, wearable garments, and adorable amigurumi. Lee lives in Ontario, Canada with her two small children, her amazing husband, and her adorable bunny Neville. Her favorite social platform is Instagram, where she posts fun, and whimsical takes on crochet. Lee is the former Assistant Editor of Happily Hooked Magazine and now focuses on commissioned designs for a number of companies and magazines.

See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: I love that mandalas are so versatile, you can keep adding row after row of texture and color and the only limit is your imagination and your yard supply. My name is Lee Sartore from Coco Crochet. Lee, I'm a crochet designer. You may have seen my work in four published crochet pattern books. There is a Modern Guide to Texture Crochet, Harry Potter, Crochet Wizardry Friends, The One with a Crochet. And Pokemon Crochet to a Crochet bag is a statement piece. It's something that you can bring about and show people and have people ask questions. And it's just something that is really usable and functional and also fun. Today we're making a really gorgeous boho mandala bag that is based off of a daisy flower. It's such a great piece and not only will you have something that you'll be able to use in your every day wardrobe, you'll also take away all of the skills that are involved in the Mandella. Learning new textures, learning how to do color changes, and just all of the basic building blocks of this particular Mandell bag to use in your future projects. This class is for crocheers who are ready to up their skills from their beginner lessons. We'll take you through each and every step of the way in order to create that beautiful texture. I'm so excited to begin this class with you. Let's get started. 2. Start Your Mandala: I'm so excited to begin this bag with you, but before we start crocheting, let's take a look at all the components of the bag as it's finished, the bag starts from the center out with some double crochets, and you can see that mine is done in a black color. The great thing about this Mandala bag is you can change colors as many times as you want. You can change colors every single row. And I'll even show you how to change colors mid row. So while mine is a black center with a yellow flower, you can change your colors up as many times as you want. So the bed continues with post stitches that will grow the flower out. And you'll notice that midway through the flower, the background begins to appear. That is a color change mid row and a great technique to learn for any kind of Mandela. After the flower is complete, we're going to have a special row about bumping that flower edge out towards you so it kind of has a three D effect. You can see here that the stitches are all loose on the front and anchored in the back. It's a really, really fun technique to make that flower really pop out. The bag continues with a really neat stitch called the cluster, and it gives you a lot of texture around this edge of the bag. You'll notice that the color changes again with some postages to create this really beautiful knit edge. Then the bag is finally seamed with a contrasting color. Again, I went back to the flower center and brought it to the edge of the bag where both panels are mirrored and seamed together. Finally, we'll add a purse strap, which is extremely easy, super customizable. And you can bring all of those colors back in and make it as colorful or as monotone as you like. Let's start crocheting. To start our Mandela bag, I'm going to be using a different color than what you saw on my finished piece just for ease of visibility. When we begin, we're going to start with a regular slip knot. And just ensure that you leave yourself a few inches of tail so that you can weave in those ends later. Our bag starts with a chain, 4,123.4 we're going to do nine double crochets into the fourth chain, from the hook into this last chain space that's closest to your slip knot. That's the first double crochet. This yarn is super chunky, so this builds really quickly. That's 234. There's 5,678.9 Now we're going to be working in joined rounds, and that's for a crisper color change for the bag. And we're also going to be slip stitching to join the top of the chain. Three that was unused from our initial chain. Four, The three chains that were left over that we're slipped stitching into the top of also act as our first double crochet. When you're counting your stitches for this round, you're going to count those three chains as a first stitch. And your total for this round will be ten, even though we only did nine stitches, because we're not going to be using this color again. We're going to fasten off on it. You can see my tail is already cut. But to fasten off, you're going to draw up a loop. And fasten off. We're going to start the next round with a brand new color. 3. Switch Colors: With this mandala bag, you can change colors every single row if you want to. Your flower can be multicolored. If you wanted to do it all in one continuous color, then you would just continue with the first color and not fasten off at all. You would continue to the next round using that exact same color and you can have a monotone mandala. Instead. There are two different ways that you can join for this round. You can join just a regular slip stitch with a slip knot on your hook. You would join into any of the tops of the stitches anywhere around with a slip stitch and chain two to begin the round, there is an alternate way of joining and it's called a standing double crochet. And I'll show you that too. It works the same way as a slip knot at the beginning of your hook, but rather than slip stitching onto the round, you're going to act as if you're already in the process of making your first double crochet. You're going to yarn over before inserting your hook into the first stitch. I like to pin it with my index finger on the top of the hook so it doesn't run away. Then you're going to put your needle through, draw up your loop as if you're making a double crochet yarn over and draw through two. Again, this is where holding onto that loop really helps the yarn over and draw through two. Again, the difference here is you'll see that that crisp double crochet exists in place of the chain at the beginning, your slip knot is actually at the top of the double crochet, and it creates less of a jog in the color change. You can see that the round is going to start with a double crochet rather than that chain. For this pattern, we're going to actually do that again, but it is a front post standing double crochet. Now that you get the concept, we're going to just change the placement of that join a little tiny bit. That standing double crochet is a great one to use in further crochet patterns. Here's where the placement of it just changes a tiny bit. We're still going to yarn over for a double crochet, secure those wraps with your index finger, Because we're doing front post double crochets, instead of going into the top of the stitch, we're actually going to bump out that post by inserting your hook from the front to the back. And bumping that post forward. And complete the same idea of the standing double crochet just around the post instead under two, under two. Again, it's the standing double crochet technique that we learned, but in a front post, which is what is required for this pattern. Now for the rest of this round, we're going to do front post double crochets around each of them. In the previous round, we had ten stitches, We're going to end up with 20. This time we've done our first front post, double crochet on this exact same post. We're going to do our second front post, double crochet. Working underneath the front post, double crochet that you just did. You're working a second front post double crochet. This is where the flower begins to build around the next post. From the beginning, two front post double crochets. It's easy to figure out where to put the first one if you're wondering where the second one goes. It's right underneath the first one that you made. You can really see what this color contrast, the placement directly under. Just lower down on the post. There's the second, we'll do a few more. The first front post, double crochet on this next stitch and the second, now that you know how to fasten off an unworked color and join a new color, I'm also going to show you how to change color in the middle of a row. 4. Stitch Your Flower: For round three of our Mandela bag, we're going to introduce adding a new color in the middle of a row. That is to create a contrast between the flower coming forward and the background of the bag. Whatever color you're going to be introducing, that's going to be the background color behind your flower. So keep that in mind. When choosing this row begins with a chain to this doesn't count as a stitch, we're going to do an increase two front post double crochets on the first stitch. We learned this in the previous rows. Next we're going to front post double crochet. Just one stitch on the next three stitches, so that's one 2.3 this is basically the petal of your flower. We're creating a contrast between the flower and the background. Instead of making that last stitch that we just did complete, I'm actually going to pull that last stitch out because this is where we're going to create the join for our new color. When you're about to do your last stitch, before the pattern indicates to do a next color, you're not going to complete the stitch in its entirety. Yarn over and insert your hook as if to front post, double crochet yarn over and draw through just two and before completing the stitch. You're just going to pause here. We haven't done our last yarn over and draw through to close the top of this front post double crochet. Instead, you're going to take your next color without a slip knot on it. You're going to hold it as if ready to crochet. Hold it behind your work and complete your last stitch with this new color yarn over and draw through those remaining two loops. Your new color is attached, it's a little bit loose, and you can see that the stitch is a little bit loose as well. What I like to do at this point is I like to hold both of the colors together. That's the cut end of our new introduced color. And the working color, hold them behind your work together so that they stay together. We're now going to do a double crochet between the posts of these stitches. I'll show you where that placement goes. You're going to yarn over to double crochet between the post of the previous stitch and the post of the next stitch. We're going to create a new space and double crochet. Here you can see that we're working between this post and the next post. We're going to be changing colors again for our next stitch. That means that you're going to have to just complete half of this stitch, not the full thing, we've yarned over and drawn through just two. You're going to drop your contrasting color and pick up your regular color for the flower yarn over and draw through with that. You can see that when you situate everything again, there's barely a noticeable jog in color from changing from the yellow to the beige. And then you can continue stitching, it's two front post double crochets for the increase. You would continue that repeat all the way around. But now that the yellow is back on, you can really see the difference in these front post double crochets that pop out that background color that is set back because it's not a post stitch, it's worked in the background and in between the post stitches and in a different color. And then we're continuing with our flower petal again. Now that you know how to create that background and start building it, you can have a lot of fun with these colors and you can start building your flower out more and doing that background color again. 5. Add Dimension: Next, I'm going to show you how to pop those flower petals out at the end of the flower section to really make them stand out for the next round. We're only working in the background color. I've already started this round and I just want to show you that we've fastened off our flower color and we're just going to continue with the background color by picking it up and continuing along. You'll notice as well that we are popping out these flower petals by working behind them in the row below. And I'm going to show you how that works. You can see here the pattern continues for this row, popping out those petals, building the background with some easy stitches and continuing to pop out those petals all the way around. I've gotten to another point where it's time to pop out those petals. And this is all about placement. We are not working in the stitches of the previous row, we're actually working in the stitches of the row before that. You're going to tilt your crochet forward a little bit towards your face. You'll notice that behind four really visible yellow double crochets from the post stitches of two rows back. You'll also notice that the yarn that we dropped for the background is carrying across the tops of those stitches. You can see here there are 123.4 double crochets, a line of the background color that is carried along. We're actually going to crochet in each one of these over top and incorporating that line of color just to secure it a little bit better. You can tip the flower petal of our previous round forward and just hold it there if that's comfortable for you or you can let it go. I'm going to hold it forward so that I can see those four double crochets pretty clearly. Now, you may be wondering why we're only doing four double crochets instead of five, because the previous round does have five stitches in the flower. But you can also see that the first double crochet is really, really tiny and singed due to the stitches behind it. So we're just going to ignore that first double crochet of that flower petal and work in the last four. The pattern progresses in that manner with that math. Accordingly, knowing that that first stitch is really tiny, just to avoid going into it at all, we're just going to do four that looks like this. You're going to yarn over, insert your hook into the first really visible double crochet underneath the stitch, as well as the carried yarn from the background yarn over. And draw up your loop and complete your double crochet like normal. You can see that the top of the stitch is completed and that carried yarn is now secure under the stitch. You're going to do that again three more times. There's 12.3 Now you can orientate your flower petal there. You can see that those stitches, because we didn't work in the previous round of flower petal stitches. Now they're nice and free, they're nice and crisp and they really pop. You're going to continue working the pattern in the background stitches of the working row, just like normal. Now that we've finished popping out the flour for these stitches, I'm very excited to show you the next bit of texture, which is the cluster stitch. 6. Add Texture: This next round on our mendella bag has a little bit of play with texture. You can achieve texture in crochet in a few different ways. One of the ones that I really enjoy is a cluster stitch. There's lots of different kinds depending on the size of crochet stitch you use. These ones happen to be double crochet clusters. You can see that I've already completed some cluster stitches around this round, and I just really wanted to show you what the texture looks like. They're in groups of three, and they rest between the petals of your flow from the beginning of our Mandala bag. Let's take a look at how those clusters are made working. In the next stitch we're going to do our three crochet cluster. It starts with a yarn over. Insert your hook into the stitch, yarn over, and draw up a loop yarn over. And draw through just two. We're going to do that two more times. Y. Insert your hook into that same stitch yarn over, and draw up a loop over and draw through just 21 more time yarn over. Insert your hook into that same stitch, yarn over, and draw up a loop and yarn over and draw through just two. What we did here is create the bottom half of three different double crochet stitches. All of the tops of those stitches are resting on your crochet hook. Now we're going to close all of them. You do that by yarning over and drawing through all of the loops on your hook to close the tops all at once. Basically, that turns all of those double crochet stitches into one stitch. You can use the back of the stitch to pop it forward and pull it tight. There's two single crochets between the next. And we're going to do that cluster again, two single crochet. Let's take a look at that cluster one more time. It starts with a yarn over. Insert your hook into the next stitch, yarn over. And draw up your loop yarn over and draw through just two. We're going to do that two more times. Insert your hook yarn over and draw up your loop yarn over and draw through 21 more time over, insert your hook yarn over and draw up your loop over and draw through just two. We have all those double crochets ready to be knocked down over and close them up, and then you're going to pop that stitch forward before doing your next two single crochets. When you do your first single crochet after the cluster, you can pull it tighter and pop that cluster out even more before drawing through the last yo, then your second single crochet and you're ready to keep going. Now you know all of the tricky components of this bag. They're not tricky at all, they're actually really fun. We're going to look at seaming your two panels together and adding the really fun strap. 7. Create the Purse Strap: You can see here we have a ton of texture going on on our Mandell bike. So far, the center, the flower petals that pop out with these post stitches, we have our cluster stitch. And you can see here that I changed color to do a little bit of a background again on our panel, and both sides are the same. The final part is just doing a single crochet stitch to join both panels together through both thicknesses all the way around. There will be some instructions for going around with just a regular single crochet at the top of the bag to create the opening as well. You'll notice also that we've added this really fun braided strap. It's very easy, and it's actually not crocheting, it's just a braid. You're going to take three of the colors that you've enjoyed from your bag. Start with a really long length of yarn and make your not. You're just going to take those three strands and do a simple braid to create the strap of your bag. You can make the drop as long as you like and really customize it. You can add a knot at the top of the bag if you think that you want to increase and decrease the length. The braid is just secured to the sides of your bag, on the inside edge. Once you've secured it, you can trim the ends. Super easy and super fun. Now that we've finished all of the parts of our bag, I'm going to give you a few tips on how to create a really polished finished mandala bag. 8. Finish Your Bag: There are a few really cool finishing touches that you can add to your crochet bag, including adding a machine made leather handle that would secure to either side of the bag itself. The other really great thing that you can do with crocheted bags is there's a common factor when you're making a crochet bag in so far as things tend to fall out through the fabric of any kind of crochet, unless it's extremely tightly crocheted, there are going to be ****** and gaps where things can come through. If you're okay with that, you can use an insert like a pouch or any kind of purse or wallet situation. The other thing you can do though is you can turn your Mendell bag inside out and hand, so on the inside edge to the join. And you can see mine is actually really contrasted, which is really nice for a visual anchor. You can hand a piece of fabric to the inside of your bag just with a whip stitch and a needle some sewing thread to both sides of the inside of your bag all along. And that will secure your bag and create a barrier for things falling through. 9. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. You made a Mandela flower bag. It's so cute and it's so small, but so mighty in the amount of things that you've learned. So, you've done postages, you've learned how to fasten on a new color. You've learned how to change color mid row in order to make that background pop. You've also learned how to work behind your post stitches in a new technique and make the flower really, really stand out. You've also learned how to do a three double crochet cluster stitch. How to do these post stitches around the edge, how to join, and even how to make your own strap. So many things in this and I can't wait to see the colors that you choose for your own mendell bag. Please be sure to share with us in the project gallery attached to this class. Thank you so much for joining me for the crochet mendella bag. Happy crocheting.