Sunday

With a painful back disrupting my Sunday adventure plans, I found myself looking for lower-impact entertainment. Embracing the spirit of my 2010 resolutions, I cooked and I created.

Now, I'm not one of those women who has a handbag to match every outfit. I have one multi-purpose number which has served me well, a gift from Ol some seven years ago. Over time, the corners of the bag have worn through the thin Japanese fabric, an injury not easily repaired. I've had my eyes open for a replacement but there seems to be a glut of *shiny* bags on the market right now, not really to my liking. Bling! Making a replacement could be a viable option. Having previously made a simple tote bag, and the trickier Choose-Your-Own-Adventure bag, I thought figuring out a handbag pattern and putting it together should be do-able.



To my fabric stash. I'd bought some heavyweight canvas cloth fabric at the Bowerbird Bazaar last October – I adore Julie Paterson's abstract designs and her use of colour. A pair of wooden bag handles from etsy – bought for a rainy day – and some denim offcuts from Ferriers for $1.78. (Ferriers stock some beautiful fabrics and you can pick up some bargain offcuts). Interfacing and matching thread came from my stash, so the only things I needed to buy were a magnetic clasp, some cotton lining and a little ribbon.

Using my old bag as a pattern reference, my new bag had to be proportionally larger to accommodate bigger handles. Originally I planned a 50/50 split for the canvas and denim across the bag front and back, but decided a one third/two thirds split looked more *visually interesting* (as they say at uni). Fast-forward through measuring, cutting out paper templates, cutting calico pieces, stitching, cutting, bringing edges in and stitching again, this became my pattern:



Figuring out the pattern was the trickiest part. The construction was relatively straightforward, although sewing in the handle loops took a little extra care, not to mention a little unpicking and resewing. (When I get some time I'll attempt to add full instructions and a PDF pattern to this post.) Some construction pics: single side of bag lining with pocket and clasp added, and bag front and back with interfacing attached.



Nearly there: right sides of lining and exterior pinned together, ready for sewing (although I had to unpin at several points to stitch in the handles, and to leave a gap for turning right-side-out).



The finished product:



In all, this project took between one and two hours to figure out the pattern, and about three and a half hours for construction. Material costs as follows: cloth fabric $10, denim offcut $1.78, handles $5, magnetic clasp $1.50, cotton lining $3, ribbon 50 cents, totalling $21.78 (thread and interfacing were left over from a previous project). New bag dilemma solved. Now if only my back was so easily fixed...

Resolutions

I'm a big list-maker. My memory is generally good, but often I need to get things out of my head and onto paper. There's a tradition I've cultivated of writing my goals for the year ahead at the beginning of each year. (For me it feels like a more meaningful ritual than getting tanked on December 31st.) The list is filed away and I pull it out occasionally, just to see how I'm travelling. Some years there may be three or four items, other years I'll have a dozen tasks to complete. Certain ambitions become carry-over champions year after year: improving my fitness, reading more, watching my finances. Looking back at last year's list, I did reasonably well: painted the study, learnt to knit, took a singing class, remained gainfully employed, got my keyboard shortcuts up. Obviously there's still some room for improvement as far as regular blogging goes...

This year I've chosen two broad targets to aspire to: to waste less and to create more.

First, wasting less. I'm not converting our egg cartons and toilet rolls into craft cash (although that would fulfil both targets), I'm thinking about that food in the fridge that get forgotten about and invariably ends up in the compost heap: two-week old bread, sad mushrooms, wilted herbs, limp lettuce, almost-liquid bananas, mushy cucumbers, leftovers left-over for a day too long. A shameful waste of resources and money. Recently I read about virtual water, which is the water used in an item's production. At the top of the water consumption list is beef, with roughly 16,000 litres needed to produce one kilo of meat! (This fact comes to mind whenever, walking past fast-food places, I see abandoned half-eaten burgers.) We need to get better at using the fresh produce we do buy. If an ingredient is bought for a specific recipe, we need to find ways to incorporate it into other things. If something's looking sad, we make using it a priority. Imagination will be required and will hopefully encourage some positive changes in our recipe repertoire. Ultimately if I can increase the amount of food making its way into our bellies instead of our compost bin, I'll be happy.

Secondly, creating more. There are a number of self-directed creative projects bubbling away in my head, waiting patiently to be poured out and served up. Is it lack of a deadline which stops them happening? Is the number of list items overwhelming? Is it working full time which takes my energy? Is it fear of failure, or a combination of all four? I know that self-directed projects can be incredibly rewarding and are great for boosting creative confidence. Maybe the solution is to break these projects down into smaller, less challenging components. To begin. Watch this space.