Reware Vintage Blog

I love handmade bags. Unfortunately, most of my handmade purses are…not handmade by me. I have yards and yards of cool vintage material I pick up in all sorts of different places with every intention of one day making something from it, but rarely ever find the time. Usually when I do make something, it is with the intention of selling it to someone else. Yesterday I had the rare occasion of not really having to do anything all day, so I decided it was time to make use of some of that fabric for myself!

This was a terribly awful wall hanging of…well, we haven’t quite determined what this supposed to be. Elk? Deer? Caribou? Something like that. I wish I would have taken a picture of it before I started to show it’s crazy ugliness. It was fake velvety material, and the thing was so tacky I just had to buy it. It screamed “Make me into a bag!”.

I framed a close up deer-like animal for one side of the bag, and the grazing deer-like animals for the other side. The whole wall hanging was trimmed in a repeating patterned edging, which worked perfectly for the shoulder strap. I couldn’t decide which side to make the front and which to make the back, so I made it reversible with a tab that fits over the top and buttons on both sides to close the bag!

I backed the material with interfacing to make sure it would stand up to my abuse and I lined it with a brown-black marbled cotton, and made several pockets to better organize all the needless things I always jam into my purses.

Four months of the material laying on my shelf, four hours to make my new favorite purse. Totally worth it.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 9:50 am and is filed under Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.