A bird in the handbag

...is worth a big chunk of fabric just sitting on my shelves making me feel guilty doing nothing.

This is a medium-sized tote bag made using Erin Michael's Uptown collection. It was out a few years ago and I bought lots of it. Lots of it. I'm finally getting to the point in my fabric collecting where I look at my stash and feel appalled instead of energized, so I'm making a real effort to use some of my favorites.

My feelings about this bag are mixed. I sort of wish I hadn't combined the birds with the strippy panels, as I think it may all be too busy. And I already have two pink homemade handbags. (I still carry the second; the first, a prototype, has been relegated to the "What was I thinking?" shelf.)

But I did a pretty nice job on the construction, and I'm happy to have used some of the birds in something I'll see frequently, instead of in a quilt I'd give away and never see again, and I learned something new by trying a new technique for the strap. So we'll call it a qualified success, and move hastily on to the next thing.

(If you want to make a strippy handbag of your own, I wrote up a tutorial about a thousand years ago and just moved it over to TypePad. Please forgive the formatting; I haven't updated it to comply with the Web standards of the 19th century, much less the 21st.)

Comments

[Jane Swanson]

Julie,
It is a gorgeous bag!

Any chance that you would part with any of that bird fabric from the Uptown collection?!? I have been desperately searching everywhere for those birds. If you'd like to part with even just a square of each bird, I'd gladly pay you for that!
Just thought I'd ask!
Have a great day.
Jane Swanson

[akeeyu]

I clicked on the second handbag first and thought "My, that's lovely--oh, come now, how bad could the first one be? Julie has great taste and--" (click) "Oh...my." Maybe you could save it for Bingo Night when you're 60?