Recently I had the opportunity to make a second handbag for a friend of mine. It's always a little scary making something for someone you know, but I enjoy making the handbags so I gave it a shot. To find out a little more about what my friend expected, she emailed me a picture of her budget wallet. You can really find out a lot about people by what they have in their purse, and I absolutely loved seeing her wallet!
Isn't it cute??
It's scary going shopping for fabric not knowing for sure what your customer wants. To get a better feel of what she was expecting, I asked my friend what main colors she wanted. She wanted a dark brown and maybe a red rose on the front, and she also mentioned corduroy. With that in mind and once I saw what she was wanting to match her bag with, it was off to Joann's to find material!
The fabric I chose was a cotton canvas. It is more durable then just cotton. A couple tips in working with cotton canvas:
1. Sew the cut edges before you pre-wash it and dry it. It will keep the edges from fraying badly and wasting your material.
2. Fray check is your friend. Use it on all cut edges after cutting your pattern pieces out. It will keep your fabric from fraying in the future.
I know my friend loves red. So I picked up this fabric piece and emailed her a picture to see if she liked the print. At this point I gave her a couple options in how I could do the bag.
1. An all brown bag with a red rose.
2. A brown bag accented with red fabric.
A cream trim piece breaks up the bag colors and adds a feminine touch to the bag.
A pocket on the inside adds a nice touch.
Snap encolsure.
One thing I did differently with this bag was add interfacing to the inside pieces to give the bag more of a shape.
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