Step right up and see the amazing, colourful bag!

Here it is. The bag of my dreams. In a lovely shade of pink which, coincidently, is the exact shade my wedding dress was those 18 and a half years ago. Being frugal gal, I first dug through my scrap bin to look for a fabric that could be used. Everything was really thin and would make a good liner, but not a good outside. I went to the market and looked for some thicker fabric, but none was to be found. But frugal gal does not give in so easily. We have masses of curtain shops in town that have beautiful, heavyweight fabric. But much of it costs like £8 a metre. YIKES! Too rich for my blood. So what can frugal girl do? Many of these places have bargain bins that have offcuts--those fag ends of cloth that are too small to do anything with. Hooray! I struck gold or rather struck pink. This lovely rich pink fabric with a pleasant sheen was mine for the mere snip of £2. I trotted off back to the market and bought some heavy iron on interfacing from the Haberdashery stall--I love the word haberdashery--a couple of buttons and I was good to go. One of the fabrics lurking in my scrap bin was a perfect match for the pink fabric. I washed and dried it on a radiator and all was ready. Here is the inside of the bag so you can see the funky lining. There are also 2 pink interior pockets I made with leftover pink, but we didn’t take a picture of them.

I learned to sew for the theatre. This is good in a way as it has enabled me to be creative in converting one thing to another or doing without a pattern. Unfortunately, there is a laziness to sewing for the stage. Thread doesn’t match the fabric? Who cares! It won’t show from the stage. Stitches all wonky? Audience won’t be able to tell. Many of my early projects followed these misguided directives and were a bit crap, if I’m honest. My last backpack was in this category. I ran out of iron on interfacing about ¾ of the way through. Now, the sensible thing to have done was to stop and wait until the next day I could go out and purchase some more. But it was Saturday and the shops would all be closed tomorrow and I want it done NOWWW (said in my whiniest voice) and so I carried on. And the bag was stiff in some places and floppy in others. And it bothered me EVERY SINGLE TIME I wore it, which was every day.

So this bag resolved to be different. I took my time. Unpicked wonky bits and did them properly. When I ran out of thread I did not carry on with just any old thing I had lying about (as tempting as it was) and only sulked slightly according to the Amazing Spiderman. And the work has paid off. It is lovely. And now I have attached all my badges--which are a great out reach--kids talk to me about books, people ask me about being Quaker or Vegan--and God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. Here is a picture of me in action, wearing the bag. I'm in Spiderman's school library.

Hooray for the amazing, colourful, beautiful bag!