You may remember that I purchased “Sew Cute to Carry” at the WA Craft Fair a few weeks ago. I had great fun heading to the Spotlight sale the following weekend when they had 40% off all fabric and I bought all that I needed to make my first bag.

All of the patterns in the book rated for their simplicity or lack thereof. Having learnt my lesson from high school sewing class, I chose one of the simplest in the book to start off with. It’s called the “Shopaholic Shopper”.

I found this Parisian themed red fabric at Spotlight so I then decided to stay with the French theme and have navy and white stripes instead of the yellow and red pattern. I chose canvas as my fabric as it should give the bag some strength.

The bag pattern called for the taupe pattern fabric to be used as the bag lining but I really like bag linings to be made of light colours so that you can see what is inside. There is nothing worse than black bag lining when you have a black wallet, black phone case, black glasses case and so on and so forth! I was devastated when Oroton changed their bag linings from cream to brown. For this reason, I decided to make my lining from more white canvas instead of the red Parisian print. It also seemed a waste of the nice red fabric!

I found making this bag to be relatively easy. I used baking paper to trace the pattern out of the book and then made a more permanent pattern out of calico. Then I did all my cutting out.

Then I simply constructed it as per the instructions and it started to look like it was supposed to pretty quickly! Excuse me in the photo – I do all my sewing after baby girl goes to bed each night so pyjamas are the order of the day!

As you can see, I had some assistance from Sushi!

I am almost finished but I bought polyester webbing instead of cotton as Spotlight didn’t have any cotton webbing in stock. Now that I have seen my almost finished product, I just can’t use the polyester webbing as it doesn’t feel right with the cotton canvas. I have ordered some cotton webbing from eBay so I will wait until it comes to finish the bag but here is where I am currently at.

Lessons learned from this project:

My top stitching is quite wobbly – I will be googling to find out the secret for sewing in a straight line.
I love my walking foot! A walking foot is something originally used for quilting but these days is often used for thick or difficult fabric. I had multiple layers and a fleece interface and it made sewing through that a breeze.
I really enjoyed making this!