Nobody Has the Bag Charm You Are About to Make: Inside Lee Sartori’s Crochet Your Own Bag Charms

Here is the thing about buying a bag charm. Someone else picked the colours. Someone else decided the size. Someone else chose whether it would be a mushroom or a lemon slice or a tiny smiling face, and then a factory somewhere made ten thousand of them. You clipped it onto your bag and called it personal. It is cute. It is fine. But is it you? Is it really, specifically, undeniably you?

Lee Sartori, the crochet designer behind the beloved CoCo Crochet Lee and a familiar face to fans of PBS’s Knit and Crochet Now, would like to suggest an alternative. Her new book Crochet Your Own Bag Charms, publishing July 14, brings together 30 quick and wildly customisable crochet projects designed to turn leftover yarn scraps into accessories that belong to nobody else on earth. Not because the instructions are complicated. But because you made them. And the result will be so specifically, gloriously yours that no one at any designer counter anywhere could replicate it even if they tried.

The projects are beginner friendly, most take under an hour, and the range is exactly as fun as the trend deserves. Mini mushrooms, retro icons, smiley faces, waffles, flowers, tiny animals, citrus slices, and a generous amount of 1990s nostalgia sit ready to be made in whatever colours your yarn stash currently contains. The book actively encourages you to swap shades, add beads, layer charms together, and generally treat the instructions as a starting point rather than a rulebook. Which means even if you follow every step perfectly, what you end up with will still be entirely yours in a way that nothing from a display case ever quite is.

Sartori herself describes her aesthetic as maximalist, in crochet, in home decor, and in personal style, and that energy runs through every page of the book. Her suggestion for styling? Combine charms into themes. Pair the palm tree with the sandal and the sunglasses for a vacation bag. Match a dog charm with a cat charm for the pet lover in your life. Change the colours to match your bag for something cohesive. Or ignore all of that and do exactly what you want, which is really the whole point.

There is something genuinely satisfying about clipping a charm onto your bag that you made with your own hands while watching television on a Tuesday evening. It will be personal in a way that nothing mass produced ever could be. People will ask where you got it. You will get to say you made it yourself. And that will feel extraordinary every single time.

At 22 dollars and 99 cents, it is also possibly the most fashionable thing you will buy this summer.

Crochet Your Own Bag Charms by Lee Sartori publishes July 14, 2026. Pre-order now on Amazon and follow Lee on Instagram at @coco.crochet.lee