Flock of Sheep Bag Pattern by Denny Gould: A Complete Guide to This Charming Knit or Crochet Project
There is something undeniably heartwarming about a bag covered in tiny sheep. Whether you are a seasoned fiber artist or someone who has recently fallen in love with making your own accessories, the Flock of Sheep Bag pattern by Denny Gould offers one of those rare projects that manages to be both whimsical and practical. It draws you in with its playful aesthetic and keeps you engaged with its satisfying construction. If you have been searching for your next favorite bag pattern, or if you stumbled across this design and want to know more before casting on, this guide covers everything you need to know — from materials and skill level to tips for finishing and ways to make the pattern your own.
Who Is Denny Gould?
Before diving into the pattern itself, it helps to appreciate the designer behind it. Denny Gould is a pattern designer whose work reflects a deep affection for nature, animals, and folk art traditions. Her designs tend to carry a storybook quality — they feel like something you might find tucked inside a cottage craft shop in the English countryside or displayed at a farmers market alongside hand-dyed yarns and wooden buttons. The Flock of Sheep Bag is a wonderful example of her design sensibility: practical enough to use every day, charming enough to spark a conversation wherever you carry it.
Denny’s patterns are often celebrated in the crafting community for their clear instructions and achievable construction. Even when a design looks complex at first glance, the steps are broken down in a way that makes the work feel manageable and rewarding. This is part of what makes the Flock of Sheep Bag so appealing — it looks impressive, but it is genuinely accessible to a wide range of skill levels.
What Is the Flock of Sheep Bag?
The Flock of Sheep Bag is a structured tote or carry-all bag featuring a repeating motif of sheep across its body. Depending on the version and colorway you choose, the sheep can appear as silhouettes, textured bobbles, or intarsia motifs set against a contrasting background. The overall effect is a pastoral scene rendered in yarn — a portable little countryside you can sling over your shoulder on your way to the market, the library, or a knitting circle.
The bag is typically constructed with a firm base and sides that hold their shape well, making it functional for everyday use. It can hold a good-sized knitting project, groceries, books, or all the other essentials that accumulate in a well-loved bag. The handles are usually substantial enough to carry comfortably over the shoulder or in the crook of the arm.
What sets this bag apart from a plain tote or a generic market bag is the attention to storytelling through design. Each little sheep, with its rounded woolly body and stick-thin legs, contributes to a scene that feels alive. Carry this bag and you are not just carrying your things — you are carrying a tiny meadow.
Materials You Will Need
Gathering your materials before you begin is one of the best ways to set yourself up for a smooth and enjoyable project. While the exact specifications will depend on the version of the pattern you are working from, here is a general overview of what most knitters and crocheters will need.
Yarn is the most important choice. For a bag that holds its shape and stands up to regular use, a worsted or aran weight yarn in a fiber that has some structure works beautifully. Many crafters choose a wool blend, as wool has natural memory and recovers its shape after being loaded and unloaded. A pure wool or a wool-acrylic blend gives you durability alongside the warm, slightly rustic look that suits the sheep motif so well. You will typically need a main color for the background — often a deep green, a warm cream, a charcoal, or a rich navy — and a contrasting color for the sheep themselves. White or natural undyed yarn is the obvious choice for the sheep bodies, with a dark gray or black for faces and legs.
Needles or hook size will depend on your yarn choice and your personal gauge. A size US 7 or 8 needle is common for worsted weight, though you should always swatch to confirm your gauge before starting a bag, especially one with a structured body. Being even slightly off gauge on a bag pattern can result in a finished object that is significantly larger or smaller than intended, which affects not just the dimensions but also the way the bag sits and carries.
A stitch marker or two will help you keep track of rounds if you are working the bag in the round, which many bag patterns favor as it creates a seamless body.
Lining fabric is something many knitters choose to add after finishing. A lining protects the interior from stretching, gives the bag a polished look when you open it, and helps small items from falling through any gaps in the knitted fabric. Cotton quilting fabric works wonderfully and comes in endless prints — you might even find a sheep print to continue the theme on the inside.
Bag handles can be knitted or crocheted as part of the pattern, or you can purchase leather or cotton webbing handles separately and attach them. Leather handles in particular give a structured bag a professional, finished look that elevates the whole project.
A tapestry needle for weaving in ends, scissors, and a tape measure round out the basic toolkit.
Skill Level and Techniques
The Flock of Sheep Bag is generally considered an intermediate project. If you are comfortable with the basics — casting on, knitting in the round, working with two colors, and basic shaping — you will find this pattern very approachable. If you are a beginner who has only worked flat swatches or simple scarves, it might be worth completing one or two smaller colorwork projects first so that the techniques feel familiar before you tackle a larger item.
The key techniques involved in most versions of this pattern include colorwork, which is either stranded colorwork (carrying both yarns across the back of the work) or intarsia (using separate yarn sections for each color block). Stranded colorwork is more common for an all-over sheep motif and creates a slightly thicker, more structured fabric — a bonus for a bag. Intarsia is better suited to isolated motifs placed on a plain background.
Working in the round is another core technique. Most bag bodies are worked seamlessly in the round from the bottom up or top down, which avoids the need for side seams and creates a clean, professional finish.
If the sheep motifs are textured rather than colorwork — for example, if the sheep are created using bobbles or raised stitches — then you will need to be comfortable with those techniques as well. Bobbles can feel fiddly at first but become rhythmic once you have worked a few.
Finally, picking up stitches around the bag opening for a finishing border or handle attachment is a technique that appears in many bag patterns and is worth practicing if it is new to you.
Reading the Sheep Chart
Colorwork patterns almost always come with a chart — a grid where each square represents one stitch and each row represents one row or round of knitting. The Flock of Sheep Bag pattern will include a sheep motif chart that you follow to place the sheep across the bag body.
Reading a colorwork chart is a skill that feels daunting to beginners but becomes second nature with practice. When working in the round, you typically read every row of the chart from right to left, following the direction of your knitting. When working flat, you alternate: odd rows from right to left, even rows from left to right.
The chart will use symbols or colors to indicate which yarn to use at each stitch. A filled square might represent the sheep color, while an empty square represents the background color. Faces and legs are often indicated by a third symbol.
A useful tip when working from a sheep chart: use a magnetic board or a sticky note placed below the row you are currently working on, moving it up as you complete each row. This simple trick prevents the most common colorwork mistake, which is losing your place and working the wrong row.
Tips for Tension and Carrying Yarns
One of the most common challenges in stranded colorwork is maintaining even tension. The floats — the strands of unused yarn carried across the back of the work — can pull too tight and pucker the fabric, or hang too loose and create loops on the inside of the bag. Either problem affects the look of the finished piece.
The best way to manage floats is to spread your stitches out on the right needle before pulling the working yarn through. This gives the float enough length to lie flat without pulling. Another technique is to twist the two yarns together every few stitches when the float would otherwise be too long — this is called catching the float, and it keeps the back of the work tidy and the tension even.
Working at a slightly looser tension than you might for a plain fabric also helps with colorwork. The extra yarn in your stitches accommodates the movement and stretching that comes with carrying two strands.
Constructing the Bag
Most versions of the Flock of Sheep Bag are constructed in a logical order that makes the process feel intuitive once you understand the structure.
The base is usually worked first, either as a flat rectangle that is then seamed and joined to begin working in the round, or as a provisional cast-on from which stitches are picked up on all four sides to create a seamless bottom. The latter technique creates a very clean base and is worth learning if you have not used it before.
Once the base is established, you work upward in the round, following the colorwork chart for the sheep motif as you go. The chart typically begins a few rows above the base, giving you a plain band to establish your rhythm before the sheep appear.
After the body is complete, you will finish the top edge with a border — often a simple ribbing, a picot bind-off, or a turned hem that gives the opening a clean finish. Handles are attached at this stage, either knitted as i-cord strips and sewn in place, or purchased handles that are sewn or riveted to the bag.
If you are adding a lining, this is done after the bag is complete and blocked. Cut the fabric to match the interior dimensions, fold and press the seam allowances, and slip stitch the lining to the inside of the bag along the top edge.
Blocking Your Finished Bag
Blocking is the step that transforms a finished knitted object from something that looks homemade into something that looks handmade in the best possible sense. For a bag, blocking evens out the stitches, relaxes the colorwork, and allows the structure to settle into its final shape.
Wet blocking works well for most wool and wool-blend bags. Submerge the finished bag in cool water, gently squeeze out the excess water without wringing, and then shape the bag over a form — a folded towel, a cardboard insert cut to the right dimensions, or even a bag shaper tool — and allow it to dry completely. This process might take a day or two depending on the humidity and the thickness of your yarn, but it is absolutely worth the wait.
Customizing the Pattern
One of the joys of a pattern like this is how naturally it invites personalization. The color choices alone offer enormous scope for variation. A classic white-on-green colorway evokes a pastoral hillside, while white-on-navy gives the design a nautical, graphic quality. Black sheep on a cream background creates a moody, sophisticated version that looks almost like a woodblock print.
You can also vary the scale of the motif by adjusting your yarn weight. A bulky yarn with large needles creates oversized sheep and a chunkier bag with a more playful, childlike feel. A fingering weight yarn and fine needles produces tiny, delicate sheep on a more refined bag — this version takes longer but the detail is extraordinary.
Adding embellishments is another option. Small pearl buttons can serve as sheep eyes. Embroidered French knots add texture to the wool. A few carefully placed wildflowers embroidered between the sheep give the scene a pastoral depth that goes beyond what the knitted fabric alone can convey.
Why the Flock of Sheep Bag Makes a Perfect Gift
If you are a maker who loves to give handmade gifts, this bag is a particularly wonderful choice. It is the kind of gift that people treasure not just for its usefulness but for the story it tells — someone sat down and made this for you, stitch by stitch, little sheep by little sheep. It communicates care and creativity in a way that a purchased gift rarely does.
The bag works beautifully as a gift for knitters (who can use it to carry their own projects), market shoppers, book lovers, teachers, mothers, friends, or really anyone who appreciates something made with skill and affection. Pair it with a skein of beautiful yarn or a small potted herb, and you have a gift that will be remembered.
Where to Find the Pattern
The Flock of Sheep Bag pattern by Denny Gould is available through the major pattern platforms where independent designers share their work. Ravelry is the most comprehensive database of knitting and crochet patterns and is the first place to search. You can find the pattern there, read project notes left by other crafters who have made it, browse photos of finished bags in dozens of colorways, and ask questions in the pattern’s forum thread.
Etsy is another option, as many independent designers sell PDF patterns directly through their shops. Purchasing directly from the designer’s own shop ensures that the full sale goes to support their work.
When you download the pattern, look for the most recent version, as designers often update their patterns to fix errors or clarify instructions based on feedback from crafters.
Final Thoughts
The Flock of Sheep Bag pattern by Denny Gould is one of those projects that reminds you why you fell in love with making things by hand. It is a design that asks something of you — attention, patience, the willingness to follow a chart row by row — and gives back something that goes far beyond a simple bag. It gives you a small, sheep-dotted world that you made with your own hands and can carry with you wherever you go.
Whether you are drawn to it for the whimsy, the craft, the practicality, or simply because you cannot imagine life without a few more sheep in it, this pattern deserves a spot in your queue. Cast on, follow the little sheep across your chart, and enjoy every stitch of it.
