I 'Felt' Good About This One!

Groan, awful title, I know.  But this week's challenge over on Little Red Wagon is to use felt in a card or project.  Now I like felt - it brings back memories of the 'Fuzzy Felt' design kit I had when I was small.  There was a rough-textured board and lots of felt shapes you could stick on to the board to make patterns and pictures, etc.  Oh, I loved it!  But I haven't used felt in a project, ever (except to line boxes when I was a book binder, but that's another story). 

So I had a think about it and came up with this:

I used the Papertrey Ink Timeless Templates 'Purse-onality Clutch' template for this dinky little handbag.  I cut the template twice, once from white card and once from patterned cardstock.  Then I chose a Copic marker the same colour as the felt and coloured all the edges and folds of the template, so that there would be no white patches showing later.  Then I attached sections of felt to each of the sides of the white card template and sewed around them on my sewing machine.  As the felt I had was quite thick, I didn't want to cover the whole template as I was concerned it wouldn't fold well or keep its shape.  Before making up the bag, I cut up the patterned cardstock template into sections that would fit the inside faces of the bag and attached these with a glue pen.  But silly me forgot to take photographs of the inside too!

I bought some fabulous 'suede' ribbon on my birthday craftshop expedition so I used this to form the handle and strap of the bag.  To close the 'purse' the strap tucks into a slit in the bottom section of the bag from (just under the button).  With the addition of some bright felt flowers from my stash, the bag was good to go. 

Now I've done this one (and learnt a few lessons for next time along the way) I shall definitely be making more of these little beauties.  They make wonderful little gift bags for small gifts or chocolates.

Mr Linky beckons at Little Red Wagon so I'm off to see if he's playing nicely today.

Happy crafting.

xx