Shopping bag

Yesterday, I finally took some time to start - and finish - the project I had been working on in my mind for quite a while: a shopping bag. Not that we don't have any... We do have quite a bunch of them - re-usable shopping bags. Ugly ones, every single one of them. Polyester ones, most of them. With our "favorite" supermarkets' names on them.

This one's different. It carries "my signature" - the leather squares. I can't seem to get enough of leather squares  Luckily, since I have plenty of "Hermes" leather left still!
And it's in linen - because I love linen, though I'm not sure about this particular linen. It's a bit more rough and a little too stiff in my opinion, but for a shopping bag I believe it's just fine!

Since I didn't have a pattern, I just dissected one of the polyester bags I had (in a weird shade of pink) and which had started to shift near the seams anyway. Not a big loss. But I liked the shape of this bag and the length of the handles.

I lined the bag - Who lines a shopping bag?, I hear you say. Well I do! - with some orange cotton I still had. The very same orange as the leather and some slippers I still have from years ago. A very bright and happy orange!

I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out - though next time (well if there will be a next time as I rarely make the exact same thing twice with a few exceptions) I might make the handles slightly narrower.

The hardest part in making this bag was the lining of the handles and I found a very elegant way to do this, if I may say so. I wanted to keep everything in one piece - so this bag consists of four identical pieces of fabric, two in each color - I'm not sure if I make myself clear here... However, if I find the time, I might write a short how-to for it. I'll keep you posted!

But for the time being you'll have to do with just a picture of my new bag!!

Oh, and by the way. I came to realize I always use the same props in my pictures: the little wooden lab stools and this coat rack . The wooden lab stools have been around for the longest time. They're K.'s and went through many different uses. We just love these little stools. The coat rack, we got from MUJI's. But I'm afraid the coat rack won't last as long as the stools, with already one of its wooden pegs cracked (I repaired it with twine though!!). It looks really nice when there are no coats hanging from it - not so, however, with all of our jackets piled one on top of each other. Also, it has tipped over a couple of times already, at least twice with little H. buried underneath... You can imagine the sound that makes...