Making it real

 

I had received this bag as a gift.

I loved the shape. It looked cool. The straw was scratchy and made the bag less than comfortable to wear.

 

The bag had no interior pockets. It also had no exterior pockets to hold a metro card.

Several months ago I bought this fabric.

It’s a Marc Jacobs quilted faux suede. I bought it at Fabric Mart for an amazing price . I wanted to copy the straw bag in the suede. I was afraid to cut into the Marc Jacobs fabric, as I only had a yard of it. This week I bought two more yards of the fabric at an even better price. I now was ready to go wild.

 

 

It took me a long time to get to it. It was the figuring out that had me paralyzed.

 

Today was the day to try it out. I had used the straw bag last night and was frustrated by it’s limitations.

 

I ended up with this.

With a pocket for my metro card.

With an interior pocket to hold random small stuff.

With another pocket to hold business cards.

The lining is upholstery fabric that was so thick that I didn’t think that I also needed to add a layer of heavy interfacing as people often do when they make bags.

As a construction note, I serged each part of the bag to the lining and then sewed the bag together on my sewing machine. If I were more obsessive I would have covered all of the serged edges with bias binding.

The leather cap hides dome less than beautiful joins at the top of the bag. You can see that the original bag has a similar cap.

Figuring out how to make that cap was the hardest part of constructing the bag.

It has room from my tablet. I can’t wait to use it.