Amy butler frenchy bag pattern

Love, love, love the combination of Amy Butler’s frenchy bag design and Echino bird fabric! I couldn’t wait to sew this bag since I finished my mum’s and sister’s a few weeks ago. I was very reluctant to put it on sale in my etsy shop as I love it so much, but hey I can always make another one for me later on.

The pattern instructions were really easy to follow, but I changed a few things this time. First I made the straps bigger and padded them with fusible polyfleece (I do this on most of my bags so that they are comfortable to use on the shoulders). Then instead of having one big pocket on each side of the lining, I divided it into 2 pockets so now there are 4 big pockets, otherwise Amy’s pockets do not really look (nor function) like pockets but are more like bag dividers. I also realised that you can fold the top part of the bag, and I actually prefer it like that.

All in all, a very enjoyable bag to sew, and I am so tempted to make another one with Anna Maria Horner’s new home dec Drawing room bird fabric or with the same echino fabric in rust/red colour or with this matryoshka russian dolls fabric that I like so much.

I embellished the bag with a little detachable flower felt brooch that I made using Sizzix various flower die cuts and the BigKick machine (my new beloved toy, which I thought was mainly for scrapbookers but can actually be very useful for jewellery making and cutting shapes for quilting, applique etc). Well, given the fact that I do make jewellery, I’ve decided to use up my beads stash and start embellishing my bags/purses with either brooches or bag charms from now on.

Also finished last week and this week: passport cover, pocket tissue holder, pencil cases, sakura ring which you can see in my flickr pages (along with pictures of japanese and french craft books that I recently uploaded).

Planned for next week: laptop sleeve, and another portfolio organizer as the one I talked about in my last post is sold already.

I heart organizers

I wanted to make a sort of portfolio organizer that would contain my sewing projects A4 notepad/tutorials/patterns/inspiration pictures and little notes to my self, so I drafted one that seemed to fit my needs (with even a zippered pocket on it). I have learned from my previous prototype making for this type of project not to cut all pieces in the beginning and am glad I did that because the calculations were not correct on my draft resulting in having to simplify the design. I ended up with the organizer below (on sale at my etsy shop). I’m quite happy with the result as it is a very useful item and can be used to store/carry so many things like drawings/magazine/notepad/inspiration cuttings/pictures…, it was fairly easy to make, except the expandable left pocket where my machine struggled with so many layers of fabric and interfacing. I still like my first draft though so will attempt to remake that one later on.

I’ve also finally made 2 of Amy Butler frenchy bags for my mum and sister but forgot to take pictures.

My other new item is a wallet cards organizer which I started 2 weeks ago, no it doesn’t take 2 weeks to make, it’s actually a very quick project but I waited for inspiration about the closing, I wanted to use leather but wasn’t sure how to attach it to the organizer (as I didn’t want to handsew or machine sew the leather) and tried using my trusty snaps from snapsource, I was concerned the snaps would not be suitable and that I would have to buy special ones but they did the job perfectly. The leather I used is 2mm thick, so is perfect for items like this. The closing is designed so that it is removable and replacable with a different one (made of fabric for example) for those who don’t like leather. The wallet comes with a removable insert for 6 cards, so that if you fancy a change of look you could take the insert out and use it with another wallet.

Next project will be a passport holder.