My thoughts immediately went to the teal vinyl material that I used to make my raincoat (not yet blogged about). Looking at the left over scraps I thought that it'd make a really nice bag especially if paired with a white/cream material, then on a trip to my local discount fabric store I found a piece of super soft cream kid leather that I immediately fell in love with.
The next problem was the design. I looked at a number of patterns online, but couldn't find exactly what I wanted so I sat down with a pencil and paper to draft my own design.
My first draft was quite floral.
However I soon realised that I had an issue. The left over pieces of the teal vinyl were not quite as large as I thought and I wasn't going to be able to get the whole piece out of a single offcut. I needed to graft a couple of pieces together. I butted the pieces up against each other and used a faggotting stitch to hold them together.
I then needed to come up with designs that didn't occur over any of the joints. After much playing around, drawing and redrawing I came up with the following designs - I had to do two different ones rather than the same on both sides due to the different placement of the seams.
Next was the rather terrifying step of cutting out the leather. I used a little box cutter knife as that was all I had on hand. An exact-o knife would have been better, maybe I should invest in one for next time.
The cut out leather was placed over the pieced together vinyl.
I used two strands of embroidery thread to top stitch around each cut out. The hardest part was keeping the two layers of fabric together. I didn't want to use pins as I knew the pin holes would stay in the leather, but the sticky tape that I had didn't stick to the vinyl very well. Still I finally managed to get it all stitched, then used my machine with the walking foot on to stitch around the outside edge, then cut the vinyl down to size.
Unfortunately, after cutting out the two main pieces of leather I did not have a lot of material left over for the remaining pieces of the bag, but I still needed the sides and bottom of the bag and a strap.
I managed to piece together two pieces to get the bottom/sides, but the straps had to be made out of a bunch of scraps. 4 or 5 pieces for the front and 4 or 5 pieces for the back. Each piece was sewed together, serged and topstitched.
I decided that in order to keep all pieces of the bag at the same stiffness each piece would need a vinyl backing, which of course also needed to be pieced together.
The bag was sewn together with two long seams.
The strap was sewn up and turned inside out ready to be attached. A lining material, a teal knit fabric with silver flecks through it was sewn up to match the bag.
The strap was tacked to the sides of the bag.
A teal zipper was sewn in between the lining and outer fabric. Finally some more hand top stitching was done to hold the lining back from the stitching.
And voila we have an Alabama Chanin style bag.
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