The shoulder bag

I finished the shoulder bag yesterday. This time I took several in-progress photos. The first one is after cutting the main pieces needed for the bag. I used one of my existing bags as the starting point, and figuring out the needed pieces and the order of assembly took quite a bit of time. The fabric is called Art Deco Punos and it's sold by Kangaskeskus.

The very first thing I did was attaching one half of the buckle to the underside of the flap. That needs to be done first, so the stitches required won't show on top of the flap. Then I put the flap pieces together and sewed the bias binding to the flap edges. After that, I sewed the flap to the back pieces (two pieces, because the flap couldn't be attached to the top edge due to everything else that needed to be attached there).

There were some parts that had to be assembled separately. The first one was the zipper for closing the bag. The edges of this piece were later sewn to the upper edges of the front and back pieces.

Another separate piece was the inside pocket. This was what led the teacher to give us the exercise of sewing pockets. In the exercise, there was a separate pocket behind the zipper, but in this case there's just a small piece of fabric sewn on the right side, then cut open in the middle and turned to the reverse side to form neat edges for sewing the zipper.

Before the separate pieces could be sewn in place, the sides/bottom (one piece) had to be sewn to the back piece and then to the front piece. I stitched these seams, and the picture below shows the stitching of the latter seam in progress. This was probably the hardest part of the assembly, although not the most time-consuming.

The next photo shows the finished bag. After finishing the previous stage, I attached the other half of the buckle to the front piece, the inside pocket and the part with the zipper to the upper edge of the back piece, the other edge of the latter to the upper edge of the front piece, and the ends of the shoulder strap to the sides. The final stage was sewing bias binding to the upper edge.

Although the fabric is thick upholstery fabric, this bag isn't very sturdy, because it has just one layer of fabric in all other parts except the flap. I thought this was complicated enough for me at this point. I'll probably try making another one with added support at some point, but right now I'm just happy that I finished this.

My biggest gripe with this is the direction of the pattern in the shoulder strap. The strap is 126 cm long, and I had a 140x80 cm piece of the fabric, so I had no choice when cutting the strap. I would have preferred the same direction as in the flap and front, but at least it's the same direction as in the sides. And if the pattern of the strap was upright, the sides should have been separate pieces to get the pattern upright there as well. I wondered why the sides and bottom were separate pieces in the original bag, but maybe this is the reason, although that bag is green all over. It could be that they just used the same pattern as for a bag in which the direction of the fabric matters.

If this had been a mass production, there would have been no problem. The straps would have been cut in the right direction, several of them side by side, so no fabric would have been wasted. As it was a single piece made of relatively expensive fabric, compromises had to be made.