Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Reversible Rag Purse with pockets

My life has been:
Traveling......out of state for Christmas......short nights........fun family times......traveling again......unexpected overnight w/friends due to snow drifts......finally home again........unpacking and putting away gifts.......company for New Years......4 days of flu like symptoms......un-decorating my house.......cleaning....FINALLY back to a schedule today!!
Today's project involves those same rag purses I was making before Christmas.....
...my mom really liked the first reversible purse I posted on here, but she was sure there was a way to add pockets and still keep it reversible......so I set to work figuring out how to do it in time to give one to her for Christmas.
I had been doing pockets like this:
Trouble is: these kind of pockets don't look right on the outside of a purse so you can't reverse it!
I decided to make the pockets as big as the squares and sew them into the seems so that when you reverse the purse they still look o.k.

 Here's a view of the purse reversed - showing the pockets on the back of it.... the striped material on the bottom 3 panels are the pockets.
Another change I made on this one was to take the side panels out and make it entirely out of squares......
 For my first purse I made a rectangle top and bottom piece and the sides/bottom were rectangles as well:
For my current purse I made six 5 in. square panels for the front and back and sewed the purse together on the sides (instead of adding a panel.

Here's how I made the closure reversible:
I made a chain stitch flower to decorate the closure and attached it with velcro....the cool thing is that by adding a piece of velcro on each side of the closure strap  you can remove the flower, reverse the purse, and add it to the to the other side of the strap --- making the strap reversible too!
My mom really liked it......guess it was a success!

4 comments:

Pamela said...

You are amazing! I can't imagine figuring all of that out. I'm glad you did, now the rest of us can try it. Ha!

Quite a time you've been having there. You probably heard Jordan's snowed in story, too. I hope things can get back to noral now...this is my first normal day and I feel like I've gotten a lot accomplished this morning.

Naturally Carol said...

Making the pockets that way is a great idea..they look as though they were intentional on the outside that way...good work!

Christa said...

Those are great ideas for making the bags reversible! I just got an order for two of these purses (with modified pockets), so your ideas came just in time! :)

Rhondi said...

Your purses are so cute! I recently bought my daughter a little rag backpack purse on Etsy and it was expensive. You are so very creative and I'm enjoying browsing your blog. Now if I could just learn to sew...