Cute Little Surprise Bag

Recently, it was a friend's birthday and I started pondering what I could get her. Lately, I have been steering away from shop-bought presents in favour of handmade stuff, and so naturally I thought about making her something. Since I didn't have that much time (I am not the most organised person in the world), I needed something reasonably quick to hook up.

That's when I thought of crochet earrings. I'd made myself a pair last year, following this really good tutorial:

And so, I made another pair in a different colour:

Pretty, aren't they? I must have used a smaller hook this time, since I managed to make three rows rather than two inside the hoops. For the life of me, I can't remember which hook size I used for the ones I made for myself (told you I'm not very organised!).

Then, I wondered how I would wrap them up, and I thought, rather than use paper wrap that would go straight to the bin, why not crochet a gift wrap as well? That way, it would be reusable as well as (hopefully) pretty. So I decided to make a little 'surprise' bag.

My inspiration for it was the bag of scrubbies I hooked up a couple of months ago for another friend of mine - and for which I intend have to write a tutorial to post on here, I promise. This new little bag, however, would be flat rather than have a round bottom. But it would definitely have the ruffled top and a row of spaced stitches to thread a pretty ribbon into.

For this project, I used a yarn from the Sirdar Snuggly Siley Stripes range, less for its lovely softness than for the fact that it had been sitting unused in my stash for over a year ;) Just for reference, I think this particular colour has been discontinued, unfortunately.

And off I went. With a 3.5mm  hook, I made a foundation chain of 16 (er, I think... but you can make it as long as you want to fit your own project), then 14 dc (US sc) into it, and then worked in rounds of dc (US sc) until I reached the desired height. I then worked a round of treble (US dc), ch1 in every other stitch from the previous round, and finished off with three rounds of ruffles: one round of 2 dc in the ch1-space from the round before, then two rounds of 2dc in each dc from the previous round (this is what creates the ruffling).

Finally, I threaded about 80-90 cm of ribbon into the row of alternating trebles and tied it into a bow after slipping the earrings inside the bag. And ta-dah!

So what do you think? Would you make something like that for a friend - or for yourself, for that matter? I plan to make another one for myself and I'll probably take the opportunity to make a photo tutorial to put on this blog. How does that sound?

Thanks for reading, folks! :)