Floral Fun

Buying purses. Spending money on something to put your money in. Perhaps a little counter-intuitive?! Unfortunately, however, I needed new purses. A main cards-and-coins purse (as mine was falling apart at the seams) and a coin-purse to keep sewing money in. For the former, I found one at Accessorize (it's so cute!); for the latter I decided to get sewing.

I picked up a zip and bought a fat quarter of this lovely fabric from this lovely local shop :)

It looks fairly vintage-inspired which isn't normally my thing, but I love it! I seem to be going through a bit of a 'bright pink and blue' phase at the moment, what with this and the doll quilt. I don't know if I should admit it, but the Accessorize purse is bright pink and blue too!

I followed this tutorial, which was really helpful. I did have one problem, however. When I follow a tutorial, I just jump straight in: I often can't get my head around the later stages until I've finished the earlier ones, so I don't read ahead. Unfortunately this meant I encountered a issue early on (how to sew next to the zip 'head') which only had a solution further down in the tutorial (unzip it to the middle so it's out of the way, don't know how I didn't think of this myself!). I got around this with a bit of hand-sewing instead. It means it's not as neat as it could have been, but still pretty good for a first try :)
 

this picture reminds me of food tech lessons at school, laying out all the ingredients

zip in!

with a little bit of hand sewing at this end

sewing around the edges

done!

So it worked out pretty well :) It's small and pretty and very useful. I feel like I'd like to make loads of these but I'm not feeling terribly inspired by my existing fabric collection at the moment. I'll have to have a root around and come up with some ideas...

I love that it's bright pink inside

After making this purse with my normal sewing machine foot, I discovered that I actually own a zipper foot! D'oh. This would have solved the problem I mentioned earlier. Ah well, I'll know for next time.

discovered in my sewing box. I gave my mum the Fireman Sam knitting sticker when I was a little girl :)

ETA: Turns out that's a 'straight stitch' foot, although I did just use it to put in a zipper! Next time I'll use the actual zipper foot...