Handbag 001

Doings on Thursday and Friday, July 17 & 18
Media in the studio: Excalibur.

I have covered a small cardboard box to serve as the inside bottom of a series of handbags. All the stuff will live in the box, which can be moved from handbag to handbag. The idea came from something similar that I saw on QVC.

This was a spray adhesive project and I used scraps of an ethnic weave left over from another project. The red handles were supposed to be the same length, and I measured carefully (twice) and still screwed up. I continued with the ethnic fabrics with stuff from the thrift shop: a teal skirt, a pink placemat and a yellow woven mat much larger than a placemat.

I then started with the box dimensions, and used quarter-inch graph paper to figure out all the dimensions for the parts of the bag.


It has a rectangular base enclosing the carboard box, and then two overlapping triangles. Smaller triangles fill in the triangular gap between the two larger triangles. I finished it off with a thrift shop necklace as a weighted drape to keep the opening closed (see first photo).
Not bad. It's very soft and floppy so the interior cardboard box kind of shows. I didn't quilt the fabrics because the weave is loose and I thought the batting might beard through. The bias edges on the large triangles will stretch out over time. If I were going to do it again I might fuse a soft interfacing to this type of fabric.