Co-Ordinating Sew Together Bag with Corduroy Bias Tape

My corduroy tote for this fall is bringing me enormous joy.  And if you’ve read about my sewing projects for any length of time, you can guess that the only thing that could possibly bring me as much joy would be MATCHING ACCESSORIES.

I like big bags, I cannot lie.  I won’t apologize for that.  But it leads to a complication: I have a hard time always finding the things I need, and spend an inordinate amount of my days digging around in the bottom of a cavernous purse searching for something.  Enter: a matching Sew Together Bag with the same wide-wale corduroy as the bias tape.

I thought if it was ALL corduroy, it would be too matchy-matchy (not that I’m necessarily against that).  So only the bias tape is corduroy, and whooo-doggie, it’s magic.

I chose a piece of fabric I’ve been hoarding, the bird print from Lush, Erin Michael’s color-by-number collection.  The green of the leaves is just the right shade to work with my corduroy, and now I get to see this fabric every day.

I just did a little quilting in the corners, rather than all over.  I didn’t want to interfere with the larger bird design, and while I thought briefly about outlining the birds with echo quilting, I vaguely recall that I was in too big a hurry to mess with it, and just wanted to get it finished already.  That’s a feeling, right?

Lots of room inside, just like the other FIVE Sew Together Bags.  This one lives in my purse with all my zillion bottles of travel-sized lotion, which I will need increasingly as the weather cools, plus a giant bag of gum and FOUR chapsticks.  (See lotion comment, above.)

Pink zipper!  The olive zipper matched better, of course, but isn’t the pop of pink fun and a little exciting?  It is totally natural that I get a little thrill whenever I see a peek of it through the opening of my purse.

But in the end, any time I reach for it, all I really think about is the corduroy bias tape.  It’s soft and supple and COOL.  And sometimes what we most want out of a sewing project is to be able to look at the finished product and say, quietly to ourselves so no one else will hear, “Man.  I made something COOL.”