…the agony of defeat.
Well, the pink bag is done. As you may or may not recall, I was wrestling with how to reinforce the straps. I finally decided that a lining would give it more strength. However, I didn’t trust my sewing skills to be able to cut, measure, and stitch the lining custom to the shape of the bag including flap, allowing for the little holes. It might not have been that big of a deal, except that the bag is felt. Thick felt. Which bent my needle, until I recalled that I had a stronger needle in my car to use. (What, don’t you keep needles in your car?)
So instead, I made a rectangular lining and decided to make some patches for the handles. Should be no problem to snag some fabric on Wednesday morning and knock that puppy out, right?
Unfortunately that day my daughter got sick, so we weren’t really up to road trips. And there’s no school tomorrow, but the teacher said she wanted to take it on her Spring Break vacation, so it had to be done by Thursday morning. Soo… time crunch.
I got a late start on the stitching, but did make a good lining for the body of the purse. The white part on the outside is interfacing, to make it a little more rigid.
I thought about adding a zippered pouch, but rejected that idea as being just one more thing that would take up time needed for essentials, namely the handle reinforcements.
So I ironed some interfacing onto fabric rectangles, stitched up the ends, and cut out an area for the holes. My husband had the smart realization that I didn’t need to cut a slit to pass the material between the two cords, which would be another point of weakness in the middle, but instead could cut two slits on the outside of the strip, since that’s not the point that’s bearing the load, and feed the fabric through the middle. So that’s what I did.
They looked like crap. Really. Utter, total crap. I’ve dialed down the color because the flash washed the image out, but see for yourself.
Now, I might have been able to justify this by saying that the zipper I was going to put in would hide the crappiness from the rest of the world. However, it was 1AM IN THE FREAKING MORNING by this point. The zipper looked like it wasn’t going to give a big enough opening for a purse this size, which meant I’d have to engineer another solution, which meant… ah, screw it. I had to be up in five hours anyway. Game over.
So I ripped out the patches, left off the zipper, although the bag still does have its lining. It looks more or less like it did while it was blocking in this pic, although now it has a lining that gives it more shape.
It’s not something I’d sell. Of course, if I were selling it, I wouldn’t have let it languish for a year, left it until the last minute, and relied on my inexpert sewing skills. I can knit lace, shape short rows, write good patterns… but apparently I cannot yet sew fabric to felt. Ugh. Serves me right for trying to do it at the last minute.
Add to this that all the tension and steady pressure of sewing made my left wrist ache like crazy, an ache which is still with me this morning.
Well, at least I learned some good lessons. And my daughter’s in school. Maybe I’ll try to grab some consolation flapjacks somewhere and drown my sorrows in maple syrup.