Easy Essential Bags is a collection of ten crochet purse patterns that will provide you with every type of bag you might need throughout your daily life. As it says at the beginning of the book,
“Grab a handy little market bag for shopping, pack ups big carry-all for a road trip, or slip on a sleek messenger bag for a run into town.”
In addition to those options, you’ll find crochet bag patterns for small shoulder bags, mid-sized totes, and a clutch. Each design is different although there is a sense of sophisticated simplicity that runs through all of them. You could easily make a matching collection with these designs if you wanted, creating a theme throughout your own accessories closet, but you could also make color choices to create entirely different effects in each purse.
All of the crochet bag patterns in this book use worsted weight yarn, Many people already have plenty of this yarn in their stash so you can easily grab a few skeins and make a purse quickly. Most of the patterns use a size H crochet hook although a few use I or J hooks for larger stitch definition.
The messenger bag crochet purse pattern is a one-skein crochet pattern. All of the other designs use 2-4 skeins of yarn. However, most of those don’t require full skeins; they simply have color changes. Some of those could be worked as one-skein crochet projects without any color changes. Either way, these are affordable projects that work up fairly quickly so that you can easily make the bag that you need at any given time.
These crochet patterns are all rated easy. They use mostly basic crochet stitches. However they do incorporate some interesting details that make them fun to work. Those details include chevrons, crocodile stitch, stripes, flower appliqués and ruffles made using hyperbolic crochet techniques. This book, like other Leisure Arts crochet books, comes with links to video instructions throughout each pattern so you’ll find help along the way if you get stuck on any of the patterns.
This crochet book is authored by Kristi Simpson who says that she loved crochet from the get-go, adding, “I was amazed that I could take a string of yarn and create something so useful and pretty!” Kristi is a knit and crochet designer with over 400 patterns, many of which you can find on Ravelry.