I am continuing on with my obsession of bags. For some unknown reason, I cannot get them out of my head. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like bags, and typically don’t carry them, so why I’m obsessing over them right now, I cannot figure out. I’e been drawing designs like crazy, and my poor sewing machine is getting a workout.

Yesterday, I was cleaning out my drawers. I’ve been trying to finally lose this weight I packed on while having my children, and over the last couple of months, I’ve been dropping it like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve lost 20 pounds (okay, well almost anyway – 17 to be exact) – as anyone who’s dropped weight will know, losing 5 pounds is roughly equal to one dress size, so I’ve lost basically 4 dress sizes. All of my jeans literally fall off of me when I walk around the house. (Right now I feel like some kind of gangsta because the crotch of my jeans is currently between my knees – but it’s the only clean pair of pants I have in the house at the moment!)

So deep in the bowels of my jeans drawer, not only did I find a few pair of jeans that are amazingly huge (and there’s absolutely no way I will ever wear them again), but I also found a pair of old favorites. They were the jeans I loved to wear while I was preggers with my last child. They were pretty much worn through, but they were a pair of faded jeans with this really pretty design of embroidered flowers on the thigh. I don’t know why I never tossed them, but there they were – and suddenly bing! I had an idea for yet another bag.

I started making this bag yesterday, around lunchtime, and I finished it around 10 hours later. (Hey, I had little ones to take care of and dinner to make!) As with the first bag that sprang from my head, I don’t consider this to be a great work – but I learned a lot in making it. This was the first time I actually properly added a gusset to a bag (the previous attempt was very sad and I made things really hard on myself) – and I realized what I’m doing wrong with the gusset. This bag – as well as the first one – has a gusset that’s too narrow. It keeps tipping over. If this were just a regular run-of-the-mill purse, I think it would be fine. But I need ot keep in mind what I’ll be using these bags for – because in loading them up with yarn and books like I have been… well the gusset just needs to be wider. I run at about a 4″ width, and I’m thinking I need to go up at least double that.

I also added elastic to the inside pockets this time – but I made a mistake: I stretched out the elastic (just a little bit) because I wanted the pockets to always lay flat against the sides. I should NOT have done that. Now the strength of the elastic pulls the sides in, and I think this contributes to the bag tipping over because the strength to hold it up is compromised. (I have noticed, though, when I stuff the pockets full of junk, it seems to regain it’s balance a little better.) What I should have done was make the elastic exactly the same width as the bag, and made the pocket wide, so it could expand if it needed to.

And finally, I’ve learned that – at least in this case – when I want to do “gathers”, I don’t need to cut the pieces at an angle. The cut pieces for the front and back were all triangle-shaped, because I wanted the light-colored sections to “poof and gather”, and it would result in a triangular shape. However, by cutting the pieces in triangles, i ended up making it quite a bit flatter than intended, and there’s definitely no “poof”. What I should have done is cut the dark pieces as triangles (like I did) and left the light-colored fabric as regular rectangles, and allow the “gathering” to straighten out the sides and create “poof”.

Other than that, though, I really like how this turned out. (You’ll see the “needle roll” I made out of leftover fabric in the second picture – I also saved the pockets to sew together to make a notions bag – that’s not in the picture though.) I’m definitely learning a lot from all of this “trial and error.”

But I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with all of these bags I’m making! Maybe I should start having giveaways or something…