If you remember quite awhile back, I bought fabric from Purl Soho to make Amy Butler’s Sophia Carryall. I completed her Birdie Sling, loved it, and thought I’d take a stab at another one of her patterns.
Whoops. I’m not too happy with how it’s turned out so far.
This bag is definitely more of a challenge than the Birdie Sling. The construction was going along just fine until I had to attach the top panel to the sides. It was awkward to sew and tricky because of the multiple layers of interfacing, fabric, and covered cording. When I turned the bag right side out to see how it looked, I had to go back and fix a lot of tucks and re-ease the fabric. Plus, the interfacing (cheep cheep Pellon, yuck) made my fabric all wrinkly looking.
I’m assuming I can steam it to make it look better.
I thought that that was the hard part until I got around to attaching the bottom to the bag. For some reason, the bottom panel wasn’t the correct size! It was either too small or too big, I don’t remember which, and I had a devil of a time getting even more layers of interfacing and fabric through my machine.
Eww eww. I did take the suggestion from someone on Pattern Review to omit the covered cording for the bottom and I’m glad I did, because I can imagine that would have made it exponentially more difficult to sew. I need to rip out the bottom and redo it, I know I didn’t sew it straight. Plus, I’ve got uncovered bits of cording exposed as well.
Needless to say, this has me wondering if the lining, which I have yet to put together, will make the bag look any better from the outside. Maybe the bottom will look less puffy and droopy once I install the false bottom. This might just be a bag I use to store yarn or fabric in and not for shopping or dining out. Oh well. At least I have leftover scraps to play with!
