When I started making Mochilas, crocheting a bottom was no fun for me. I could never get the bottom to lay flat. Fortunately I found out that I just needed more than 8 increases to make a flat and firm bottom. Since then, I love making bottoms.

In the summer of 2020, I had the idea to make a mandala with the Mochila technique. Around that time it became very popular in the Netherlands to make mandala’s in lace crochet technique.

It is such a shame that you never see the bottom of a bag, so I thought: Now it is time to show off how beautiful a ‘big bottom’ can be. And what better way to show a bottom than to hang it on my wall.

What does mandala mean?

The number of repeats in a mandala also have a meaning. My mandala starts with a 6 repeat and later it is a 12 repeat.

In September 2020, my husband and I went on a super relaxing holiday to Gran Canaria. On this beautiful island I designed this mandala. The Mandala is named after our hotel.

When I started this project, I thought that it would be less work than making a Mochila bag, but boy was I wrong.

My husband calculated how many stitches there were left to do. This was a shocking number, 21.605! 😳

21.605 stitches left to do, this is crazy. Then I got to thinking: How many stitches are there for the side of an average size Mochila. When you have 250 stitches and the side pattern is 55 rounds high, you have to make 13.750 stitches. So making this madala was much more work than making a normal size Mochila bag. I never would have guessed that.

I didn’t have the nerve to calculate how many stitches there are in the complete mandala, while I was crocheting it. Afterwards, I did make the calculations. This mandala has almost 25.000 stitches!

The bigger the mandala got, the harder it was to work on it. Because of the hyper-mobility of my hands, I took breaks and I worked on other projects. That is why it took so long to finish it.

Reference: Mandala Cordial

In the Indonesian Mochila Facebook group you see beautiful bags made with polyester yarn, so that made me curious about the yarn. I really wanted to see and feel this yarn with my own eyes and hands.

In Indonesia, cotton is hard to come by and it is very expensive, that is why they use polyester yarn. The word polyester sounds like plastic to me. So I thought that must be very stiff and hard to work with.

Thanks to Catlien Zoet, I have some left overs of 3 different polyester yarns. Catlien, who lives in Indonesia, sent the left overs to my sister in law in Jakarta. My parents in law, who were visiting them, brought it back to the Netherlands for me. Thank you so much for doing this Catlien.

First impression

Time to test

I tested ‘Poly Apple’ first. The sheen on the ‘Poly Apple’ is the nicest of the three yarns. When you look at ‘Poly Apple’ you would think it is the same size as ‘Schachenmayr Catania’.

My next test was with ‘Poly Cherry’. ‘Poly Cherry’ looks slightly thinner than ‘Catania’. To my surprise it was much nicer to work with the ‘Poly Cherry’ than I expected.

The ‘Poly Mamirli’ looks a lot thicker and it feels really soft. Maybe that is because it is loosely twined. It took some time to get used to this yarn. This yarn is also curling around itself a lot and it splits a lot. The longer I crocheted with it, the better I could handle the splitting.

Conclusion

With all three yarns you can make a firm bag.

I like ‘Poly Cherry’ best. It is the easiest of all three yarns to work with and the size of the stitches is the same as with ‘Catania’ (mercerised cotton yarn, 125 meter per 50 gram).

My second choice would be ‘Poly Mamirli’. Keep in mind that your bag will be bigger with this yarn.

In October I crocheted a few small bottoms, to show that there is not much difference in size when you increase 8, 10 or 12 times.

A few weeks later I thought it would be nice to make some Christmas coasters too and I started to design a Christmas tree coaster.

Then I tried a Christmas bell, unfortunately it did not look good. No matter how often I changed my design, it looked more like an ugly Christmas tree than a beautiful Christmas bell. So that one didn’t make it into a pattern.

The next try was a Christmas star. The design was a little challenging, but crocheting it went smooth. A Christmas star has 5 points, that is why I made the Christmas star coaster with 10 increases.