Our Church organised a lovely event following the Royal Wedding. We had our own "Royal Tea Party," where we all dressed up all nicely, wore nice hats, drank tea, and ate dainty tea party treats. Characteristically, I decided to make a dress for the event, and to round off my outfit with a matching purse. (More on the construction of the dress on a different blog posting - I might get to that at some point!!) Anyway, my arrogant side said, "how hard can it be to make a purse? Surely it's just a flap, and a box thing?" So, that's what I made... a flap and a "box thing." It resulted in a terrible purse. Terrible. Almost useless. Well, It didn't fold down properly, so I put wire into the edges, then it curled all funny, wouldn't lie flat, wouldn't open nicely, didn't fasten properly, curved in the middle when I put anything more than a tissue in, dragged down in the middle and popped right open when I put my car keys in. In other words, it was completely useless as a purse. However, I used the purse on that occasion. I disliked it, but thought that there was hope for that purse, that it just needed some "reworking." Good thing I didn't discard it!
More than a year went by. Then I made the clutch purse, as just that ONE purse had taught me a whole lot about purse construction that I had never known before. I took my rugged attempt at a purse apart, changed the corners on the inside, changed how I added the lining, changed how the flap was attached, changed how I incorporated the interfacing (it had it before, but I used it differently this time), removed the wire (that always was a stupid idea, and I even knew that when I put it in originally), and changed how I added the handle. By this time, I had also bought magnetic snaps (the sew-in kind, as I was still foolishly intimidated by the more professional type that I use now).
This purse took ridiculously long. The first attempt probably took about four hours. Taking the thing apart took about two hours. Planning for the re-assembly probably took another couple of hours, and re-sewing the whole purse start to finish probably took another three hours. This is outrageously long to spend on a simple clutch purse. In retrospect, of course, I wish I'd just looked for a pattern to begin with, followed it properly, and would probably have been done, start to finish, in less than three hours. But hind-sight is always 20/20, isn't it?
Regrettably, I did not take pictures of the failed first attempt. This evening, however, I took pictures of the revised edition. It's not too bad, if I do say so myself. I don't know if I would repeat this one, but it certainly is usable now, holds its shape, and can carry its full capacity without opening. I don't have a pattern for this one, but I do know how I did it.
So here is what it looks like now.
As you can see in the last picture, I was so chuffed with the addition of the little coin pouch from the blue party clutch purse, that I decided to make it sort of a "tradition" to add one to my future purse creations. This one is slightly improved over the previous one, as it has lining that prevents raw edges.
Added above is an extremely unflattering picture of what is actually a gorgeous dress that I made to wear for this party. I just photographed it quickly to show that the top is identical to the purse, and the skirt part of the dress is pink with the same organza overlay as is on the top half of the dress and on the purse. (It's not all one colour, because the dress was made of a failed attempt at a mid-shin-length skirt from a few months earlier made of plain pink satin, a rough draft of the top half of my wedding dress, and really large piece of organza from the remnants bin (I think there were about three metres, in two chunks in total). I'll do a separate posting about this dress, complete with much more flattering pictures, in a separate blog post at some point.
As always, please feel free to comment about anything from this posting :)
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