Classic Book Bag from Burdastyle

So, here is the first of my creations to go online! It is adapted from the classic book bag how to at Burda Style (links below). It was very easy and not at all time consuming (I made it in an evening while someone else was playing Playstation...). I added an outside pocket with a bit of the lining fabric for contrast and an inside pocket made out of the outside fabric. I also added a really small pocket inside the inside pocket because both the bag and the pockets are quite spacious and I am always losing my keys down in the bowels of big bags and have to spend forever searching for them! I also added a couple of little red buttons on the handles because I thought they were cute!

When I went into the shop to buy fabric for this bag I was thinking I would probably go with a nice sturdy (and hard to get dirty) navy blue with maybe a red lining. Somehow though I left with pink! Oh well! It will wash when it gets dirty! The fabric looks a little weird in the pictures but it doesn't actually look like that, it's the ribbing of the corduroy that makes it looks so strange on the screen!

The name of this pattern appealed to me because I have a serious book addiction am constantly buying them. When I stop into a second hand book store you would think I was buying for a small army or at least a full high school literature class so I thought this bag would be awfully handy for taking book shopping. But then we were tidying the flat and after finding patterns stuffed in all my drawers, fabric scraps everywhere and assorted notions basically hiding in every nook and cranny I realised that we don't actually have the space for me to take over with all my sewing stuff. So I've decided to use the bag to consolidate a lot of my stuff into one handy place. Of course as I accumulate more and more stuff it will definitely not fit in the bag and I'll have to find another solution....maybe I'll be making my navy bag after all!

I really enjoyed this how to and ended up with a cute and highly functional bag when I was done. I've made quite a lot of stuff that at the end I thought "cute but I'll never use it". Happily this isn't one of those occasions!

Make one for yourself with:
http://www.burdastyle.com/howtos/show/1145 http://www.burdastyle.com/howtos/show/1151

Casting On

Hello and Welcome to my brand new sewing blog! I'm just a beginner but I really enjoy it and I'm getting better all the time! I'll document all my attempts here and hopefully will make a lot of cute things!

I just got a new sewing machine last Friday and love it so much! It is a million times better than my last machine so now I feel like I can really get going with making things!

Right now my only problem is that I'm waiting on my first shipment of gorgeous fabrics from gorgeousfabrics.com! I've got so many plans for when my beautiful new things arrive but Parcelforce keeps foiling me! Tell me, does it make sense to try to deliver 6 times during the week while I'm away at work and then decide to return it to the sender all the way back in the USA before they've even left me an attempted delivery card? Grrr, Parcelforce! At the moment I am frantically emailing and calling them trying to get them to just let my parcel wait for me to pick it up at the post office this weekend instead of sending it back across an entire ocean. Hopefully this will work out but they've done this before and my package ended up back with my parents in Atlanta before I ever even knew they had tried to deliver it here so I'm not going to hold my breath.

Later today I will post about my cute new bag and try to quit griping about Parcelforce!

**Update**

Hoorah! I have triumphed over Parcelforce! I called and they told me there was nothing they could do because they had already changed the address back to the sender and it was waiting at their depot to be sent. I said "So it is still at the depot? In this country?" and she said "yes, but it is waiting to leave". So eventually, after I finally convinced her that it would be easier to change the address while the parcel was still waiting in the depot than to send it all the way back to the US and then have to send it all the way back to this country, I got her to put me through to someone in the depot who was totally nice and immediately said it wasn't a problem and that he would schedule it for redelivery at a time that worked for me! I'll be picking up my fabric from the post office this weekend! And then I'll get started making all the things I have in my head!