Sew Necessary

Anna raised a good point in her comment to my last post. Yes, I will finally be able to invite people into my home once I have finished cleaning up. That will be a first in many, many years and is long overdue. I still have the dining room that I will need to clean up before Christmas anyway. I have products for my ONS spread everywhere that desperately need to be entered into my accounting software and the storefront. Unfortunately, the accounting software seems to have gone bust and won’t do anything with regards to reports (I was trying to check my sales tax liability so that I could file the return for last quarter) without crashing. I’m afraid to try any other functions. I’m going to have to try to reinstall and see if I can just limp it along until the end of the year when I will officially switch that business over into QuickBooks. The Microsoft Small Business Accounting package that I’ve been using for years was giving me fits and is so overly complex that when they decided to stop supporting it earlier this year, it was a good excuse to move to QuickBooks. QuickBooks now supports multiple currencies, which is why I chose MS Accounting in the first place, so it will be nice to switch to an industry standard accounting product for small businesses.

Oh, and to answer Von‘s question, yes, I will post pictures of the reorganized office, including the nice new desks, once we’ve finished cleaning up. Which will hopefully be soon!

Anyway, I got off track. What I really meant to blog about were my sewing endeavors yesterday. I didn’t include it in yesterday’s weekend report, even though I spent hours on it yesterday. I really should have been stitching, but I had the irresistible urge to sew. You see, I have been trying desperately, in vain, to find a purse to replace my existing one. It’s nice and little, but I have outgrown it by about an inch in the tall dimension. Plus, it has arm straps, not full shoulder straps. The hunt for a commercially produced bag that small has been completely futile, though I certainly tried really hard. So, I decided to make my own. I found one that I think will fit the bill and I found it pretty readily, which was lovely. With one Google search, I quickly found PursePatterns.com, which is an amazing resource for purse patterns. I chose the Two-Hour Tulip pattern, as seen on the front page of twohourtulip.com:

I then went out to Joann.com and chose two heavy home decor fabrics. Luckily, the home decor fabrics where on sale. One was only $5 so I pulled that one for a test run and a more expensive ($13 a yard on sale) pattern that I liked a little bit better for the real thing. Add in a total of three lining fabrics because I wasn’t sure if the colors that I picked were going to work once I put them together in real life, plus magnet closures and purse feet and you have the makings of a purse!

Here’s the less expensive fabric:

And the more expensive:

I bought a dark brown lining (the color is called potting soil) for the first one and a fuchsia lining for the second. Incredibly, both worked out quite well. I bought antique gold feet and magnetic closure for the first and gold ones for the second.

Of course, you know me. I can’t just follow the pattern. No, I’m heavily modifying the inside. The outside will look the same (sans pocket: I hate outside pockets), but the inside will look more like my current purse. Not only am I putting pockets on both the front and back of the inside, but inside the one pocket, I am putting staggered credit card pockets. It’s exactly like what I have in my current purse and I love them. I’m also sneaking in a small pocket on one of the sides for my new iPod Nano. And maybe a matching one on the other side for the earbuds. I just thought of that. See what you made me do? 😆

At the top 1.5″ of the lining, I am putting a strip of the outside fabric, both for a little extra interest and to hold the magnetic closure. I see all sorts of bad things happening if I try to attach the closure pieces just to the lining fabric. Riiiiiiiiiiiiip! My current purse actually has a faux leather strip on the inside that serves the same purpose. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to add the purse feet at the bottom, due to the way that the purse is put together (four tulip-shaped pieces that come together at the points to form the bottom), but I am going to try my best. My current purse has faux leather on the bottom and I’d rather keep the fabric bottom of this one from sitting directly on surfaces.

Despite the title, I didn’t actually put many stitches in yesterday. The only things I stitched up were the shoulder straps. Everything else was a lot of cutting out and interfacing. It was time-consuming, especially since I was winging all of the little pieces that will make up the card holders and the Nano pocket. Today should see things starting to come together, I hope. So, a two hour purse project? I think not. Maybe if you kept it simple and stuck to the pattern and you were an experienced seamstress, but I did and am none of those. 😉

I will, of course, show pictures when the purse is done. And maybe during the construction process. Who knows…