Dia Del Muerte Purse

Finished my purse today!

In all fairness, I’ve only been working on it in earnest for a day or two, but it’s been on a back burner for months. I bought this cute little purse back in November when I was at a teachers’ convention in San Antonio. It had this Dia Del Muerte print that was really cool and I was super excited about it.

However, it had a few small problems. First of all, it was super tiny—I could barely fit my cell phone and wallet in it, much less any other paraphernalia I might need to carry around (and this was pre-iPhone when I was carrying around a little Samsung slider!). If I wanted to carry my iPod with me, I was out of luck unless I had a pocket in which to stow it.

Secondly (and probably for the better, as it turns out), the zipper on the purse died a few weeks after I bought it (no pun intended). I was much peeved, but I carefully, carefully dissected it, taking it apart stitch by stitch until I had two small panels of the fabric left. These scraps of fabric sat on my inspiration board for months, waiting for me to get to them. I knew I wanted to make another purse from them and I was pretty sure I wanted to use the Dotted Dream pattern from Ottobre’s online pattern selection. The ‘how’ of it all has been percolating in my mind for some time, though, through baby clothes for my daughter, several shirts for my son and a birthday outfit for my best friend’s kid. Finally, though, I was able to get to my sewing and here’s what I came up with.

I ended up using a red baby cord to go along with the skulls. I fussed with the cutting out of the top panel pieces since I wanted them to come to a chevron pattern, but I wanted them to come to a 45 degree angle.

I got these panels sewn together and the side panels sewn on and then I had to interface it.

Because I was using baby cord, I decided to use a sew-in interfacing instead of iron-in, and I think it worked out pretty nicely. I got the stiffest stuff I could find, but it was still flexible enough that when I was turning the lining bag outside in, it fit through fairly easily.

Speaking of the lining bag, I added pockets to it so that I’d have places for my phone, my wallet and a pen or pencil. I think I’m going to make a matching Purseket-type thing for it, as well. I made one several years ago, but I used really ugly fabric for it since I was just figuring out the dimensions of the project. I got really lucky with my pattern since, size-wise, it was pretty perfect, but I think I’m going to make another one using this really stiff interfacing and see how that works.