While my mom was staying with us over the summer, she absolutely fell in love with my mustard yellow handbag and called dibs on something (anything!) made from the remaining leather. Since I didn’t have enough to make another Nairobi bag, I started looking through my stash and fashion mags to get some inspiration, and lo! from the Feb 09 Burda WOF “Australia The Movie” accessories feature (not on the website I’m afraid), there was the perfect handbag, already in yellow even!
There were only two pattern pieces to trace – the main bag body (I doubled the paper pattern so it was the full size rather cut than on the fold to make it easier to lay out on the leather) and the small flap. All the other pieces were rectangles of various dimensions that Burda list in the instructions – the only one I actually used was the piece for the side and bottom of the bag.
Inside there’s a zippered pocket:
I simplified Burda’s design as there were far too many buckles, rivets and such for such a small bag, but I kept the flap and faux buckle (which conceals a magnetic snap!) in the end as it visually broke up the tweed nicely.
Also, I swapped the leather and fabric from Burda’s design – I wanted this bag to be mostly leather. The tweed (does it look familiar?) is stitched to the leather around the pinked edges but I didn’t want to weaken the seams by basting the tweed in place around the seams and creating more needle holes than was absolutely necessary, so I actually used shock! glue to keep it in place. I tried three different sorts for stickiness, stiffness, and bleed-through, and ended up going with Fabri-tac as it also smelled the least toxic!
And just in case she might not like it, I hedged my bets and filled it with some Cadbury’s choccie bars she can’t get in America! As it turns out, there was no need to bribe her, she loves the bag anyway and is using it as her current day-to-day handbag!
This is the last of the Christmas gifts I gave this year, though I’ve still got two books I received to show off. But in other news, I got my first haircut this week, and got to finally(!!) make the switch back to my contact lenses after a year of having to wear glasses so my eyes didn’t bleed (yeah, for real.). The effect together was so much that my nurses didn’t even recognise me til I opened my mouth!!
