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| Purple Fur Purse |
Story? Yeah, kind of. I had this piece of purple fur for over a couple of years now and somewhere in the last week of February 2011, my sis suggested we should make a circular purse out of it. We visited literally every several cloth store in Dharwad to get the exact purple satin cloth. Finally, we found it in the first shop we visited in Hubli.
In just 4 days in the first week on March, the fur was transformed into a purse. Wanna take a look at the stages?
Placed on a bedspread are 6 pieces of fabric –
- Above & Below - 2 pieces of fur (the front & back sides are shown)
- Left & Right – The reverse sides of Satin circles, on which canvas has been stuck (by ironing). Canvas has been used to give the purse some strength.
The next day, aluminum handles were stitched within the fur’s inner circles.
The fur’s inner circle has been covered over an aluminum handle and tacked in place with pins.
The loose edges of fur have been held in place and stitched around in running stitch.
This is how it looks from the front side.
The edges of satin were folded over & ironed in place. Then a machine stitch was done around the outer and inner edges.
The satin has been placed above the fur (the wrong sides facing each other). The upper edges of fur and satin have been stitched together. A running stitch has been made around the handle to hold it in place. The lower edges of fur and satin have been tacked in place using pins. The same has been done for the other piece of fur.
Once the process has been done for both the pieces of fur, they have been stitched together (right sides facing each other). Then the purse has been overturned.
Take a look at the amount of space.
A semicircular inner purse was created with another small pocket in it. And then stitched the sides of the zipper to the either sides of the fur purse.
– What a miscalculation that was:
- The semicircular purse could hardly hold anything – too little space.
- The zipper stitched directly to the fur purse further restricted the space for holding contents & movement.
What next? – Dismantled it.
Next, I thought of a curved edge around the zipper. And also gave it some strength by sticking canvas. Also, the gussets were stitched to either sides of the semi-circular purse to increase space for contents.
Despite measuring the fabric, cutting it accurately & stitching by hand making sure the marked lines match– one edge has tilted towards one side – wonder why?
At this stage, the purse was lacking something.
My sis created a flower with pearls. But we still felt it lacked something. So we decided to buy an artificial flower and attach it.
And we knew exactly where in Hubli to look for it. So we decided to carry the unfinished purse (bad decision as the purse got dusty due to the long day in the sun & sweat). We checked all the flowers they had to show on March 12th. No luck. Did not look good enough to buy. And we were finally thought I should make a crochet flower. Luckily… on our way back, there were some artificial flower vendors on the road… we casually took a look. They had a matching purple flower, fallen off a vase.
We (my sis & I): Do you sell individual flowers?
Vendor: Individual? Why? We sell a full vase.
We: (Showed the purse) We need that purple flower, which has fallen off the vase.
The vendors willing the gave the flower & checked around if they could pluck some other which matched better. They even plucked a leaf to go with it (that was sweet). We paid them some money for it….. and we had a flower that matched. But still something was missing.
Nothing was done further on the purse until April 15th (Yday night) – I stitched the flower in place and stuck 4 pearls to act as stem… That’s it… this purse was in the to-do list for too long and we had to finish it!
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