Bag of Horrors - The End!

 Part one of the saga can be found here 

Vogue 8568 - View C

Saturday night I had a surge of creativity and decided to utilise it on the Bag of Horrors, yes, I live the high life. So with trepidation I slipped the bag under the machine and proceeded to sew the facing and lining to the bag. And for once the faux leather didn't play up.

I could have done the rest there and then but my tummy was screaming out to be fed and watered, and who was I to argue. A chinese takeaway and Shiraz were on the menu.I would finish it on the Sunday

Come Sunday, a banging headache, so wrestling with my bag which is akin to having a sofa under my machine was out of the question.  Decided Monday would be the day when I put this project to bed, but lo and behold, I had a sleepless night and had to get up early, as a result I felt tired and poorly most of the day.  The bag was out of the question. Is this bag ever going to get done I thought?

Yes, and it did today - Wednesday 25th April 2012. Does a little merry dance. Glad to see the back of this bag.

Well here it is, the bane of my life. I omitted the pocket tab, as there were one to many tabs for my liking, and they were a big pain in my ample derriere.

Speaking of derriere's, because I placed the flapped pocket lower than it should have been - not sure what happened there -  it is dragging the backside of the bag. Oh well c'est la vie.

Interior

I won't give you chapter and verse on what else went wrong, I would be exhausted and I want to chill tonight. Besides, who's got that kind of time. In a nutshell it includes misplaced tabs and pockets, dodgy looking topstitching, cr*p this, cr*p that, all glaringly obvious, but hey I finished it.

I might use it as my knitting bag, as I don't want all my hard work and intense nervous headaches going to waste.

If you look to your right after the"Recent Comments" section, you will see a section called "Nightmares". Guess what's making a debut in that little ole section.

Vogue 8568 - The Rundown

Fabric: Main - Faux Leather. Lining -  some cheap tartan.

Likes: All the pockets.  Two zipped, one in the front and the other on the back. A front flap pocket. Two internal, one for a mobile.

Dislikes: All the tabs and the construction thereof, they looked puny after you sewed the seam. I omitted this after several attempts and just cut out the tab, no lining or no interfacing, recommended by my tutor. Left the edges raw, since it was faux leather. They look ten times better.


Sew Again? - Not this particular view. No Sirree!
 

Conclusion: I had a love hate relationship with this bag, hated working on it but loved coming to the end. I have learned a lot with this project and despite all the issues, due to my inexperience or not having the right tools, I have enjoyed working with faux leather. 

I do need to practice them zipped pockets as my stitching is crazy. I felt like I was swinging in the dark. Need to master them, so a lot of practice and acquiring some tips are in order.

This is not a bag I will be making again just yet, unless someone is prepared to pay me a grand . . .

 Adios my fellow sewers . . .

"The only place that housework comes before sewing is in the dictionary"

Bag of Horrors . . . Part One

Well I never.

                          

Vogue 8568 - View C

I really did not think I would get this finished but am not one to have UFO's (unfinished objects) here there and everywhere, so I plodded on; doing a little something to this bag whenever I felt a trickle of creativity seeping through my bones.

I had made view B of this pattern a while back in a funky curtain fabric and really enjoyed the process, a few hiccups here and there but not to the magnitude of this version. I decided to tackle View C as it looked a little more challenging then view B. I was up for a little challenge, only a little one, mind. 

Pocket Tab

All seemed to be trickling by fine until I had to do the tab on the pocket, which involved  sew-in interfacing and lining. Yes I didn't realise at the time but the tartan fabric was stretch. Oh yes I was having all kinds of fun sewing the faux leather and this stretch together.  This may be a piece of cake to the experienced but to me it was like being slapped in the face with a wet fish . . .  every ten seconds.

Due to the faux leather being heavier than the lining when you turned it right side out you had the lining peeping around the fabric, I think they refer to it as Turn of Cloth in the US. I did not know about this phenomenom and was baffled as to why this was happening I even cut the lining slightly smaller and the damn thing kept happening. Only when I screamed for help on one of the forums I learned what it was. By this time I was brandishing a sawn off shotgun aimed point blank at the tabs.


I sewed the lining to itself to eliminate this. I know there are ways to counter this by the way you cut and pin the fabrics together but they say not to use pins on faux leather because of the large permanent holes. I tried doing it with the bendy hair clips I was using but it was too much of a chore when trying to sew as I wasn't using a Walking or Teflon foot and at times had to gently pull the faux leather through. I did reduce the pressure of the foot and that helped a bit in manoevering the fabric.

I  wasn't happy with the end result of the tab, it looked  puny and shapeless and my topstitching stunk. I continued to re-do, slash, re-do and slash, since faux leather left large holes, so I had to start the whole  process. I was like a woman deranged, and with each frenzied seam unpicking, I was morphing into a female Norman Bates.

Yes Norman I had the very same look in my eyes.

At one point I decided to alter the shape of the tab by cutting off the short narrow end. In my mind this was going to look funkier and hip. In reality after completing the usual time consuming steps, that considerably altered the shape of the tab, this was not the case. It looked like a TONGUE. I kid you not.

I threw the towel in at this point and decided to make the executive decision of omitting the tab from the pocket, leaving the snap as a design feature, and to be honest I wasn't too thrilled about having a tab on the pocket anyway and thought the bag tab heavy with the four to be attached to the top half of the bag. So who knows why I kept cutting out and re-doing the tabs like a woman possessed. Only a psychoanalyst would know the answer to that one. 

To be continued . . .

Memory Lane Creations

Thought I would kick start this blog with a trip down memory lane, creatively speaking. First up is what I call my Butterfly Tote made with cotton canvas, created one night at the helm of my beginners status. 

I had created a couple of tote bags before this one,  in my Level One beginners class but I did not feel as proud of them as I did of this one. Obviously my skills have moved on since I have made this but I recall copying the shape from a favourite tote I got with a magazine and feeling oh so proud after whipping it up one late evening.

Still haven't used it. I feel I will, one bright summers day, she sighs.  Okay next up is my flare skirt. Used one of the patterns from the Flirt Skirt Book

Made this skirt in Level two of my sewing class, which I am still on. Although I had made some skirts before I had never done one from a pattern before, without an elastic waistband. I really like this skirt on, just the right amount of flare and I feel quite girly in this.

ETA: I did make a boo, boo on this.  After I had cut out the pattern, I started cutting out the leftover fabric for scrap. I know, what possesed me. I suddenly realised half way through I hadn't cut the waistband so had to cut on the cross grain, hence the direction of the stripes on the skirt. I was gutted as I had worked out how I was placing the waistband in relation to the stripes and I thought Ooo this will look the biz. Oh well best laid plans and all of that lol.

And finally my more sophisticated tote sporting a zip closure and interior pockets Vogue 8568. My first commercial pattern and I have to say I had no idea what most of the instructions meant. So I was glad my tutor was there to assist, worth her weight in gold she is.

I chose a funky printed curtain fabric,and am actually pleased with it. Don't get me wrong it is far from perfect but it looks pretty cool.

Okay that's all for now. I shall return when I have completed View C of the said pattern which am making in faux leather causing me Tense Nervous Headaches . . .

Sayonara . . .

The good thing about a rumour is you get to learn so much more about yourself you didn’t know.