Handbag with inner pocket how-to

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Hello everyone!

I hope you enjoyed my last handbag posts. I’ve decided to try somthing new since I still had a lot of leftover fabric, so I decided to make a handbag for my mother’s birthday *^_^*

I generally love to figure things out for myself, so I didn’t have patterns or even a clear idea of how this would look.

Here’s a brief how-to to show you how I made it:

Materials:
* one large rectangular piece of fabric
* one smaller rectangular piece of fabric for the pocket
* a long narrow piece of fabric for the handle (or find a nice ribbon that compliments the fabric)
* thin ribbon for decoration

Step 1: Find a rectangular piece of fabric and hem the ends. Fold it in half.

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Step 2: Sew along the sides (following my red dotted line), making sure to leave the hemmed ends open at the top.

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Step 3: Taking the smaller piece of fabric, hem the ends, fold in half and sew along the edges (make sure to leave the opening with the hemmed ends!)

If you would like, add two little straps and sew the top of the straps to the seam of one side of the handbag -this will ensure the stitches will not be visible from the outside.

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add ribbon on the pocket to match and hide the inner stitching

Step 4: Turn the bag inside out and sew a ribbon to the seam all the way around. Here you have the option of keeping the ribbon flat, or lightly hand sew and bunch up the fabric to give it a more romantic look.

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Step 5: Add a handle by sewing the long fabric to the ends (I made a tube, flattened it, and bunched it like the main handbag) but you can also use a nice ribbon.

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Pretty much done! What do you think?

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I thought it came out quite cute…..I’ll have to make one for myself later!

1 Comment

  1. Miho
    Mar 22, 2010

    Thank you! I enjoyed making it and was happy with the final result. I’ll have to try and make another one from the TONS of fabric piling up in my home.

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