Saturday, March 21, 2009

Shipshape!

My plan to make one thing a week that is not an order is coming along well at the moment. I've just finished another new bag! And it is another zippered bag! I've been wanting to make one like this for soooo long, but was a bit stuck on the zipper vs lining issue. Everything I could find said that lining had to be hand stitched into this type of bag. My Adorn work may give the impression that I like hand sewing, but that is not strictly true! Slip stitching is NOT my forte! So I turned to Nikki again. I knew she'd have the answer, and she did - in the form of her City Bag pattern.

Now I know my bag looks an awful lot like Nikki's, but I didn't actually use her pattern. I just used the instructions that came with it! The main difference with mine is that it has a completely separate panel for the base because I didn't want the seam to run through the middle of it. So the pattern is mine, and the techniques are very gratefully borrowed.

All in all I'm pretty happy with The Shipshape Bag!



What's up with the name you ask? Well, I usually find that naming the bags is harder than making them... So as usual, I wrote a list of the words I associate with this one, then hit up the thesaurus. One of the words on my list was tidy, and when I looked that up, I got shipshape. It also works with trim, which was another word that should have been on my list.

Ship"shape`\, a. Arranged in a manner befitting a ship; hence, trim; tidy; orderly.



If you like it, it is available to purchase here.

And, thank you Nikki!

2 comments:

Nikki said...

Thanks for the plug, Kirrily. And you've used my patterns exactly as they were intended! The idea is that they're a teaching tool for techniques that can improve your over-all skills. Good to see the system works!! YOur bag is fab!

I HATE that most patterns tell you to slipstitch zips in. There's never any need for that if you know enough about construction.

Jo (ruby-jo) said...

The bag looks great. I did the same with Nikki's zip purse and clutch patterns, I only bought them for the instructions. She knows so much about constructing bags I thought the price was well worth it for some insider tips on how to make them look professional.