Amidst holiday celebrations, ice storms, hosting family with power outages, and nanny interviews I was able to sneak in one last sewing project for 2013. And thankfully so because it was my quiet time to unwind, to do something small just for me. Usually I don't get a chance to sew until the very end of the day but at least after Adam's gone to bed and order has been restored to the living room and kitchen, I can sit down at the Singer for an hour or two without interruption or distraction. Sometimes I'm still whirring away at the machine after Mike has already put down his book and turned out his bedside lamp and the house is completely quiet. As long as I get a bit of sewing time in though, I feel refreshed.
The latest project was a simple leather purse for carrying change and random items. As with most of my projects I started with one idea in mind which then transformed into something completely different as the sewing progressed.
At first it was just going to be a quick and easy cloth coin purse to replace the one I lost several months ago. Since then I've been finding loose change all over the place; in my pockets, in my bag, in the holes of my jacket liner. Of course, it's never when I really need it most like when I'm already holding Adam in the blistering wind and standing by the shopping cart stop across the parking lot of No Frills or Freshco and cursing about not having a darn quarter on me.
So enough of the madness, time to sew up a solution! I decided last minute to spice up the purse and dug out a sharp mustard-yellow leather scrap I picked up two months ago.
The shortest zipper I had on hand was bright red which really pops out against the leather. You can see in the above photo I put a scrap piece of cotton across the end of the zipper tape to attach it to the leather sides. Worked out nicely. I added a similar cotton strip across the top but unfortunately I mis-measured (ok, mis- eyeballed) the width of the leather bag. As a result the top of the zipper doesn't close completely leaving an ugly gap (see below). Sloppy sloppy sloppy.
Oh well, I wasn't going to shed any tears over the zipper. Next was the inner lining. I used some scrap quilting cotton to make two pockets for the change purse and added white braided piping along the top of the divider piece.
Then I hand-stitched the inner lining to the zipper along the inside of the purse. I wondered whether I could have machine-sewed the liner to the zipper first, and then sewed the leather afterwards which would have saved me hand-stitching altogether. But the mental exercise of flipping the leather and lining inside-out and outside-in - and figuring out the order of it all - had exhausted my brain so I gave up. Besides, it wasn't much hand-stitching.
Oh, and I also added a small loop along the side of the purse in case I want to later attach a strap for hanging around my wrist. Typical for me it wasn't until after I had already sewed the bag closed before I had this bright idea so I ripped open the seam to add the loop. Luckily I hadn't put in the inner lining yet so it was only a few minutes of setback :)
And there you have it. Some loose change and lip butter in one pocket...a few fivers (oh geeze, no twenties??) in the other pocket.
Speaking of fivers...have you all seen the new polymer five dollar bill? It features Dextre, a two-armed robot mounted on the end of the Candarm2. I'm not much of a space geek but it's pretty awesome that I worked on that robot and supported the launch from JSC in 2008. My signature is on that thing somewhere ;) Or whoops, was that supposed to be a secret?
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