I recently (November 22, 2010) completed the fat bag designed by Samanta and posted at her blog, and as much fun as it was to make this bag, I’m assuming, dear reader, that you want to as well:

The directions are in Portuguese, a language in which I have no fluency whatsoever, and my hope is that this page will help crocheters like me who want to make this wonderful bag before they learn Portuguese well enough to do so.

I have included links to the directions I found that made the project easier for me to complete so that if you want to make this bag, you can.

Here is a graphic provided at Samanta’s blog:

I started off with the mistake of not chaining a long enough chain. While the graphic shows 14 hdc in the foundation, the pattern calls for 32 hdc (I chained 33 and made my first hdc in the 2nd chain from the hook). The blue stitches are where the crocheter is supposed to notice that not every stitch is drawn. I did notice, but not until I had finished the body of the bag for the first time.

I frogged that, started over, and got this:

Once I redid the body of it, the fat bag was ready to line. As a result, it sat for many months until I found “how to line your crochet bag” tutorial. Here is the result:

and here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 of my efforts to line (successfully I might add) this bag.

Once I had the lining in, I used this excellent tutorial from Bend Beanies to figure out how to gather the body of the bag and add the straps:

So, thank you to Samanta for sharing the design of her awesome bag, and thank you to the fabulous community of crocheters who took the time to share the knowledge they had gained making it.