Carpetbagged.

Done..well, enough to show it off to you all.  There’s a bit of hand stitching left to so, closing off the gap in the lining that I used to turn it through to the right side, and a few anchoring stitches which should hold the lining in place at the bottom, and also stop the wires from shifting out of position.

All the materials assembled at the start- I didn’t use the hairy string in the end, I found some thicker cord in stash

Scraps of marled jersey made the perfect piping to strengthen the sides

This was a FAIRLY straightforward project,but things that plagued me included

• horrendously fraying fabric, I swear each piece probably lost half an inch at least
• the resultant mess:  never a tidy seamstress, the dining room looks like a bomb’s hit it!
• my usual sloppy work in ‘quilting’ the thin lining fabric to some scrap underlining- hey ho, it’s only bag lining

• fishing through the bin- I managed to mislay several small components several times, including the bit of rouleau for the keyfob, and the backing plates for the clasp.

• general idiocy, including making the faced openings for the pocket zips too wide [I ALWAYS do this], melting said facings with the iron, and sewing the bag bottom onto the top…

• messing up the simple fastening strap THREE times

• 

  Coathangers, eventually cut to more or less the right size…

  wrestling ineptly to cut the coathanger frames to size and making a rather shoddy job of it

• general bodging

Ah well.  I blame my general all-purpose work-related fatigue and baseline sloppiness for all of it!  And the sewing room gremlins of course…

Straps salvaged from an old bag to use on the wife’s carpetbag…

Anyway, here it is, along with some pics I took along the way.  Wife likes it, and wants a smaller version of her own, with brass rings to accomodate her binocular-topped walking cane, so that’s a general mark of approval!

[[Ah…something weird is happening.  I have all the pics uploaded onto my PC as usual, and can view them perfectly well, but I can’t upload anything onto the blog, I just get ‘http error’.  Any clues oh computer literate ones?]]

I finally found the backing plates for the catch- one on the floor, and one on the freezer. Yes.

Edited:  I switched to Chrome and I can upload again.  Oh Firefox, what has happened?

The inside, including three different coloured zips. Why wait to buy more? IT’S A BAG!

Bag with umbrella in its holster