In purse-uit of happiness

I have finally finished the cabled purse!

A quick trip to the fabric store in O-town hooked me up with some fab lining fabric in a smooth printed non-silk satin. Black with white print (the white background would have gotten too grimey looking, I suspected) in a Chinese theme (ooh! dragons!) which topstitched up nicely. After blocking the front and back pieces (I felt the gusset was already very straight and lay quite flat, due to its moss-stitchiness, and I didn't want to risk it growing in length) I used the gusset and a front/back piece as pattern pieces to cut out three lining pieces, then I added a pocket to one side of the lining to hold various small girly things. Stitched the pocket to the right side of the fabric (lots of neat topstitching for that bit) and then the front and back to the gusset (a slightly tricky finagle on the curvey corner bits). This didn't take long on Friday evening, and I went to bed to crochet the gusset to the front and back of the bag, stitch on a faux-horn button and add a button loop. I discovered that gusset was at least 15 cm too long, so Saturday morning there was a quick frogging and re-knit of the decreases for the very end.

Then I topstitched the lining into the knit bag itself. I wanted the topstitching on the inside to be neat and tidy and as close to the edge of the lining itself as possible, so I used red bobbin thread, and a spool of black thread for the needle (top) thread. Worked out nicely and the stitching is very difficult to see (ok, if you look closely and try to see it, you can, but it's certainly not obvious, and hides nicely in the cable pattern). The lining wraps around the D-ring at the end of each gusset to insure the gusset doesn't stretch oddly under the weight all those loonies and toonies I always end up carrying around. Wrapped each end of the gusset through a D-ring and topstitched down using only red thread. Having successfully (and tearlessly, thanfully) frankened the strap off the suede messenger bag...

Oh, dear messenger bag...


...and here's a big part of the reason I haven't carried the thing in years: the strap was held on with a safety pin!

I topstitched one end to one D-ring, checked the length, trimmed to length, and topstitched the second end. Ta da! One completed purse!

Here's the finished deal:


...in all its red-dy cable-ness!

Here's a rather blurry detail shot of the closure:



And in the spirit of all the blogstalking that's been going on, here are the contents of my lovely bag (today, at least):

So here we see the effects of teaching highland dancing to a bunch of kids. Above we have, from the top: a fiddle cd by Natalie MacMaster, with hand written notes for a choreography number for the girls, my sunglasses (cheap, Fossil) my keys on a purple carabiner, and my ghillies (ooooohhhhhh...capezio split-soles).

And the contents of my handy-dandy pocket, from top left: driver's license, Shopper's Drug Mart points card, key card to get into my church, OHIP health card, BMO interac card, business card from the cobbler where they do great work on dance shoes (I need some extra eyelets put in those ghillies!), my Starbuck's card (totally spent, waiting to be refilled), a $10 bill, silicon earplugs (DH plays a lot of gigs at crappy O-town clubs where the soundguys...well, frankly, they suck, and think louder is always better), some L'Oreal Glam Shine in Diva (how appropriate!) and MAC lipliner in Soar.

And here's what helped me get this bag finished:

Thanks, Wembley! I couldn't have done it without you!!

Tomorrow: Christmas gift knitting plans!! If you're family, don't read it, you're probably on there somewhere!