The Gathered Bag

I've been following all of the great activities that MADE has put together.  Celebrate the Boy was a really fun month, and had plenty of ideas that I could use for a girl.  And now she's put together Celebrating Mom!

I found this great tutorial through the Celebrating Mom event, and quickly got started with putting together my first gathered clutch!  I used Amy Butler fabric from the Daisy Chain line.  I made a few alterations to the interior to include more card holders and a separate ID slot.  Here's the finished clutch, which I gifted to a good friend for her birthday:

So, how about the gathered bag?  Well, I'm a bit of a bag junkie.  I buy bag patterns constantly-but there's always something about them that keeps them from becoming my favorite bag.  Too structured, not structured enough, not enough pockets, straps are too narrow, etc.  So I sat down with my patterns, books and magazines and started looking for everything that I *do* like.

I kept coming back to this diaper bag from the Amy Butler Little Stitches book.  I liked that it was more structured, because I don't like tossing everything into a sack just to dig around for what I need later.  And a more rectangular shape would be easier to add things like zippered pockets.  So I went to my fabric stash and pulled out a yard of MoMo's Tea Time twill in the tomato colorway from her Wonderland line (pic here), plus the coordinating charm pack.  I was determined to make this bag from my stash!

I spent a few days thinking about the bag, and what to do to jazz it up-and that's when I remembered the Gathered Clutch!  What a great way to add some dimension and personality to an otherwise simple bag!

Along with the yard of twill fabric and the charm pack, I used:
1 package of brown piping
2 zippers (interior zipper pocket was done similar to this tutorial)
some brown kona scraps
heavyweight interfacing
6'"x12" plastic canvas to give the bottom some stability

I also took the gathered clutch pattern and created a wallet from my leftovers.  I left the gathers off of the wallet, but I added some piping and a loop on the outside.  I also added a bunch of extra card slots on the inside.

Here's the finished product:

   

Bag interior:

  

And the wallet interior:

 

Wow.  I really should learn how to create photo mosaics. :)

So far, I haven't found anything to change on this bag.  Yay!