28th May 2013 - My first bag

I finally managed to sew my first bag from a pattern all by myself. Took me longer than expected and as my teacher once said: it takes longer to prepare everything from cutting out the pattern on tracing paper, cutting the fabric and ironing on the interfacing, before the actual sewing starts - which doesn't take you too long then.

Please admire my piece of work; I am really delighted with myself:

The fabric is actually curtain fabric which I bought in Hickeys. They had a big piece of it in the scrap basket. It came at a price of €10 for two meters and I still have material left, hopefully to make a matching rucksack. Overall costs: around €25, which includes fabric (the purple one above and a silver grey I picked up in Germany the last time I went over), a zip (can't see it here, it's at the top) and two different types of interfacing: a volume interfacing and a thinner one to stiffen the inner fabric.

The strap is a bit wider which makes it look a bit wonky but I am delighted that it turned out so well. The pattern was rated "2" on a scale of 1 to 3 and I even understand the instructions no problem. Only made the mistake of sewing in the zip wrongly first time around, but was able to fix that.

Overall time invested: about 8 to 10 hours, split over a couple of days.