I’m a total beginner at Tunisian crochet with only one project under my belt, a square-mesh market bag.
I liked the process (it was much less tedious than making long chains with regular crochet for a market bag, which, as you might gather from my phrasing, I despised) but didn’t like the look of the boxy square mesh nearly as much as the various diamond meshes I’ve worked with other crafts. So I went a-googling!
What I learned: the boxy square mesh is apparently called “filet” or maybe “filet net” (this is something I need to look into more), and turning it 45º to make it into diamonds is unusual, but not inconceivable.
The main inspiration I’ve found is Vashti Braha. She wrote about the concept back in 2015 and used it in her Aery Faery pattern (more images here). After seeing her work, I felt confident that what I wanted to do was possible, though I wanted to approach it slightly differently.
Since I enjoyed the original Haekelgold Tunisian Crochet Market Bag pattern, I used its mesh portion as the basis for its 45º cousin, but instead of starting on one of the sides and crocheting even rows, I began at a corner.
I added an extra chain at the beginning of each row that folded in the middle to create a triangle-shaped increase on the edge; over the course of the rows, this created a side of the square. I did something similar at the end of each row. Once I got to the halfway point, I chained straight to the first double crochet to create a triangle decrease.
It took a little trial and error to figure out the right number of chain stitches and such for the pattern I was working with, but the square-based, gather-heavy market bag approach I’ve been using is exceptionally forgiving. The corner where I started ended up being weirdly elongated (you can see it in the upper-left of the main photo), but once I did my edge-gathering, it was not noticeable.
I used a much smaller hook for the handles (a 2.0mm, vs. the 7.0mm I used on the mesh portion) to make it tight and tidy. I followed the pattern instructions for the area around the heart but did it Tunisian style by keeping the loops on the hook and completing a return pass on each row. I didn’t have a good idea of how to do the handles themselves with Tunisian crochet (because I wanted to make them long-wise to integrate a stretch-resistant string) so I just crocheted them normally.
I’m very happy with the way the mesh, and consequently the bag, turned out. I wasn’t sure the diagonal approach would work as I envisioned, but it pleasantly surprised me and earned a place in my stitch toolbox.