Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Beautiful Belle Handbag

I treated myself to a new spring bag by sewing up the Beautiful Belle Handbag by Amy Butler.

beautiful belle 1

I had been holding on to a few half yard cuts of Washi for a while. If you've ever read my blog before you'll see a fabric hoarding trend here. I rarely, if ever, buy a fabric and immediately use it.

I didn't follow the pattern for any of the insides of the bag. The large divided pockets it called for didn't seem all that useful. So I made a zip pocket on one side and a couple of open gusseted pockets on the other. It's hard to get good photos of the inside of a bag once it's sewn, so I snapped a couple quick shots before I sewed the lining together.

beautiful belle 4

beautiful belle 3

Unfortunately, the cell phone pocket called for in the pattern is too small for my phone (even though I did a quick test measurement and thought it would!). I stitched it on, found it too small, ripped it off and reworked it (using the same piece of fabric) by changing the way I pleated it. Technically it fits now, but it takes quite a bit of fiddling with it to get the phone in, so most of the time I end up just tossing my phone in with all my other junk. It is a nice pocket for my sunglasses though!

I also added a magnetic snap closure to the bag. So glad I did because otherwise the bag would flop wide open every time I set it down.

beautiful belle 2

I also made myself a matching fabric envelope (using this tutorial, with a size adjustment) for my coupons.

fab envelope

1 comment:

  1. OMG, this is so cute, Jenny! I love the adjustments you made. It's so great to be able to make something to fit your needs. And thank you for sharing the tutorial on the fabric envelope. I need one of those, or maybe two or three!

    ReplyDelete

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