Theme park crochet-Thorpe Park's The Swarm Bag

I've recently been learning to crochet, and while I've been enjoying making other people's designs, I've been wanting to try and make my own as well. While I'm not quite ready to make amigurumi from scratch yet I have made my own cross stitch patterns in the past, so I felt comfortable coming up with and making crochet tapestry designs from scratch.

I want to make designs based on horror movies, themes parks, scare mazes etc, and since theme park season has just arrived I thought I would go for a coaster themed bag that I could use when I visit them. Originally I was planning to make a Saw-The Ride bag as it combines horror and rides, and even made up a pattern for it, but I quickly realised I was not ready to single crochet something large that involved a lot of black yarn (if you know you know!) so I'll be saving that design once I've done a few of these. Instead I went for one that had a much easier colour palette to work with...The Swarm!

This took so much longer to finish than I was expecting, but I'm glad I stuck with it! Overall I'm really happy with how my final piece came out, and the only thing I would change would be the green I used for the logo on the front (I felt like the moss green wouldn't have shown up enough on the front with the grey, and the green I used was the only other green I had in bulk to hand so used that, but I would definitely go for a different shade of green for the logo if I were to remake it)

I really enjoyed designing and crocheting up this bag, so I'll be making many more in the future for sure. I plan to experiment with different sized bags, trying out half double/double crochet, as well as using larger hook sizes on future projects to see how that changes my final pieces.

If you'd like to make your own I've included the designs below. I used single crochet (US) with a 5mm hook, and yarn weight double knitting. For the strap I used this YouTube video as a guide. I made mine to be a crossbody bag. 

I plan to go to Alton Towers soon, so I'd like to make something for that. Fingers crossed I get something designed and made in time!