Not-so-red Poppy Purses

I mentioned last Friday that Becky and Anna came to visit over Memorial day weekend.  While she was here, we made poppy purses using the great tutorial over on Sew Sweetness.  I'm not really historically a bag maker, but I've made a few recently (with some success), and really like exploring the different shapes and looks.  Anyway,  Purse Palooza is going on right now over at Sew Sweetness, so there's lots of yummy stuff about making purses etc.  Definitely check it out if you're interested.

So Becky and I took turns playing with Anna and sewing and we were pretty successful in making our whole purse in one long day.  I'd assembled the ruffles before hand which helped, but the construction part went relatively smoothly.  Aside from switching out a few interfacing suggestions to use some interfacing I had on hand, we followed the tutorial exactly.  It was easy to understand and follow, and wasn't a particularly hard bag to make.

The only thing I'd do differently is make my lining a little smaller, even with increased seam allowance on the inside (compared to the outside) my lining is a bit too big.

Becky made hers with a purple ruffle on yellow/purple print.  I used the rest of my favorite grellow stripes (previously seen here) combined with a fun Amy Butler Soul Blossoms print for the body/lining of the bag.  I was so excited to use some of these bold prints which I don't use too often in my quilts.

I didn't get final pictures of Becky's bag, but you can see her outer ruffly part in the pic above.

I love the way this turned out!  What a fun bag for summer.  It's pretty spacious, Mike says it's "lovely" but says it in the tone of voice that suggests otherwise.  He keeps calling it my pillow.  As in, "don't forget your pillow honey..."  If I weren't afraid of damaging the bag, I'd whack him with it. I'm not sure what's in all of your purses, but mine is pretty heavy.  I think a good strong whack would make him think twice about saying unkind things about my fun bright bag!

One final note,  I couldn't find a local source for the hardware, particularly the bag slider piece (you can see it in the second and third pictures).  The tutorial recommended LoraLee's etsy shop so I went there to buy my hardware.  I'd definitely recommend her shop.  She has a bunch of different hardware and she shipped my order like half an hour after I placed it on Thursday (even though it was already afternoon), and it arrived  in my mailbox by lunchtime on Saturday (awesome since that was when Becky and I were making the purses).

You guys been doing any bag sewing lately?  Suffering from the comments of your partners/housemates?