< So this is embarrassing… I made this bag in October… last year! It has sat up in my laundry, only awaiting the handles; and the following draft post has been sitting forlornly in my drafts folder ALL THAT TIME. But no more! I finished the handles last month, polished up the draft post and just bunged in some pictures and bammo… DONE! Finally! >
hehe, anyone who knows me knows that I don’t make bags very often… it’s the one luxury I BUY! but I saw this tutorial by Amy over at Heather’s blog Closet Case patterns and just thought it was super chic and cute!! Coincidentally, when I pinned it I found that a few years previously I had also pinned a similar tutorial written by Erica over at honestlywtf.com! Guess it was a sign… for me to get on and DO it!
I’ve been carrying my shopping in generic carry bags rather than plastic shopping bags even before the placky-bag bag came in, because I’m such a bag snob, hehe, and while I do have a quite a lot of perfectly serviceable plain ones stashed in the boot of my car I decided I wanted a nicer one for when I wanted to look more classy-like in the supermarket. Probably just because I wanted to give this awesome tutorial a go more than anything else, to be honest…
I bought 3 bundles of this cotton rope/cord from Bunnings and just had at it… my first fold is 20cm, and I started sloping the sides after just 10 rounds, because I wanted my bag to be wide, but flattish. The longer your first fold, the wider the bag, widthwise, and the more rounds you stitch before sloping the sides up, the “fatter” your bag will be. My bag itself is two whole bundles of 25m, and then I decided I wanted leather handles rather than rope ones…. I had a small scrap of deep chocolate brown leather from when my friend V was cleaning out her stash. I punched the holes for the stitching using the leather tool I bought from Skinhuset in Copenhagen during our visit there a few years ago, and handstitched using a leather needle and deep chocolate brown Gutermann’s upholstery thread.
I also wanted some little internal pockets inside the bag; one side has a zipped one for keys and the other has an open, more accessible one for my phone… these are made from a stiff, cream-coloured cotton broadcloth, actually the same stuff I used to make my rag-doll Sally… and I just zig-zagged them down inside the bag. Because there’s all the mad crazy zig-zagging going on on the outside of the bag already, you don’t really notice a little bit of extra zig-zagging for the pocket attachments. The perfectly matching “rustic” chocolate-brown zip came from an old pair of jeans that I previously cut up for another project…
so that’s it! I really really love it, and think it will come in handy not just for shopping, but just for anything and everything, really. So far I’ve used it precisely once, when I took it to my local Australian Sewing Guild meeting, to hold my sewing stuff. It worked!
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