Patchwork Bag

I love this bag, so much so that it got quite worn to the extent that it started to get a big hole on the back.  I started off by fixing it and patching up the hole with a brown piece of cloth.  Originally the back was green material like the handle you can see so it was all khaki green with a brown patch in the middle about 10cm x 10cm.  Not very glamorous!

One day I was going through clothes which were taking up too much room in my cupboard.  I found a patchwork skirt that I'd bought in Barcelona a few years ago - I barely squeezed into it when I bought it.  I just loved the colours!  But I never really fitted into it and it just lived in my chest of drawers never seeing the light of day because it really was too small for me to wear. 

I'd seen a programme on appliqué and had the brain wave of turning the skirt into something else, unpicked all the fabric pieces and started sowing them onto the backing of my favourite bag in a patchwork style using the appliqué method. 

And here's the finished result.  I absolutely love it and am so proud I can't help telling friends "I did this!"

It is still a work in progress.  I am going to finish off redoing all the piping in cerise cotton.  I think the green with cerise go together very strikingly.

My first project

Last November, as the winter nights were drawing in and I was getting very inspired by the Maker Hood idea or make do and mend and create something new... I decided to bring some new life to a tired shoulder bag - my cat bag.

It was in a sorry state, the metal bits for the zips had fallen off and all the piping was coming off.  It was an old favourite that I'd bought about 10 years ago from Camden to cheer me up when I had a cold.  Naturally, I was still attached to my cat bag and wanted to give it a new lease of life so I bought some ribbon for the zips and sewed thread around all the piping in attractive bright colours, worked on the zips with the ribbon and patched up any holes I could find.

And this is the result of my hard work. I am very pleased with it and have definitely given the cat bag a new lease of life - I just need to figure out how to disguise some rusty marks on the front from badges that had lived there for tooooooo long.  Any ideas?