Purse Finish

Yes, it’s finished! My first attempt at the Two-Hour Tulip Purse. I’m pleased with how it turned out, especially with all of my modifications to the lining and pockets therein, but it’s too wide for me to use. Bummer. I think the front and back panels fit what I’m looking for, but I will need to heavily modify the side panels to cut them down to 2/3 or 1/2 of their current size. I will, however, use this one for a while first and see what other modifications it might require before I take a second shot at it.

I quite enjoyed playing around with this pattern, fiddling with all of the inner pieces and then putting it all together. In fact, since I finished the purse on Saturday, I felt quite annoyed on Sunday that I didn’t have any of it to work on anymore. I guess that’s a strong indication of how much fun I had with it. 🙂

Here are some photos for you. The colors aren’t quite accurate in most of them, but it is quite hard to reproduce them correctly. These are pretty close, though.

The front:

A bit of the side:

Credit card slots inside the inner back pocket:

A pocket in the right side lining for my new iPod Nano:

There is a similar pocket diagonally across the purse, in the left side lining, for my earbuds. And here’s a shot of the bottom, so that you can see how the four tulip-shaped pieces came together:

All in all, the pattern and assembly were fairly straightforward. There were only two questions I had when putting it together, both of which were easily answered by Terry. One of them was due to not reading the instructions carefully enough and the other was just an inability to clearly conceptualize the construction in three dimensions. Terry is excellent at three-dimensional visualization and manipulation, so he, of course, understood immediately. I am not worthy. 😉

If anyone is interested in trying this pattern (I would highly recommend it) and my modifications, you can see most of the pocket additions that I made in the above photos. In addition, I did add strips of the heavier outside fabric to the top of the lining to accommodate the magnet, as I had said I would. That worked out quite nicely, though I would really advise that you use a taller strip so that the magnet pieces aren’t so close to the seams. I had to do sections of the topstitching by hand because I learned the hard way that I couldn’t sew that closely to the magnet sections. I snapped a sewing machine needle off quite cleanly in the attempt.

I did not end up using the purse feet due to the way that the points come together at the bottom. The bottom center bows out so I think that the fabric would end up touching surfaces that it sits on anyway, even if I had put purse feet in the approximate corners. I’ll see how it wears while I’m using it. The other thing that I have not yet done on this purse is to sew darts into the sides so that the purse will fold up nicely and reliably when closed. I think that I may reproduce a bit of how my current purse is sewn, which includes darts in the sides, as well as reinforcement of the outside corners as they lie when the purse is closed. I think that will help it to keep its overall shape. If I feel so inclined, I will share photos when that portion is done.

I do have to say that it seems quite boring to me in looking at the front of it. It needs a little decoration of some sort, but I haven’t quite figured out what. I have buttons that would go nicely with it that I might be able to sew on in some sort of configuration. It really needs some sort of decorative strip to break up the expanse of fabric, maybe about 1/3 of the way down from the top. I could potentially stitch some sort of swirly pattern that complements the paisley pattern in the fabric and tack that on. I already know that I have a shade of DMC that perfectly matches the brown lining, as I used it to tack the lining down.

Which reminds me, that’s one other addition that I did. I hand-tacked the lining to the outer fabric along all four seams, from the top to the bottom points. It was tedious, but the lining lays so much more nicely that way.

So, if anyone has any recommendations on decorative touches for the front and/or a free border pattern that I could stitch onto cream/tan fabric with brown thread and then tack onto the front, I would greatly appreciate it.