Pranks and the no sew wallet

Where I work, we are often busy and the work is mentally taxing.  As a consequence we make our fun where and as we can.

One of my colleagues has been away at Police College on his Sgts course and we discovered he'd left his drawer unlocked.  Last year we got hold of his diary and covered it in pictures of the "Thunderbirds", you'd think he'd have learned!  So now his diary is covered in pictures of Justin Bieber.  We sealed it with clear contact and I crocheted a pretty "cosy" for his diary, in pink, complete with a large pink flower.  He's back at work tonight and we cannot wait!

Now my contribution to our little prank was literally dreamed up, literally and crocheted in the space of a couple of hours.  It's basically a wallet for his diary.  I crocheted a chain of 50, then single crocheted all the way around the chain to end up with a rectangle. Moved into granny stitch and within a few hours I had produced the A4 diary cosy!

When I got home from work I started again with my leftover gelato cotton to make something smaller. To reproduce it but this time taking a bit more notice of what I was doing.

See the bottom?  By crocheting around the entire chain I made a base.  I then switched to tr and crocheted two into a single stitch at the corners.  Effectively crocheting in the round.  Then I switched to grannies.  The key was having the base chain in a multiple of 3.  This little wallet began life as a foundation ch of 28, with one being used as the first sc when I began to crochet into the foundation chain.

In various sizes this would make an awesome Ipad or Kindle cover, cellphone sock, laptop sleeve, coin purse, make up bag or even a large messenger type bag.  The possibilities are endless and I plan to explore them.

You could use any type of stitch you want, I just decided granny stitch is one of my quickest to do and it grows so quickly.  I'd like to try all sorts of different things and once I have the method for creating the bottom perfected I will post a tutorial.

This one is going to be a make up bag to carry my seldom used lipstick and mascara about in.  I'm not big on make up so a tiny bag like this will do nicely.

I will make a liner and sew it in.  If nothing else my rudimentary sewing skills are getting a good work out lately.

The edging along the top is crab stitch, something I have never done before as an edging but am liking a lot.  It would look amazing on a headband.

It took me some time and patience to figure it out, there are instructions in my book the A to Z of crochet but I have seen instructions on line as well.