Free Pattern link for an upcycled/recycled handbag

Hi ya'll! Hope you enjoyed your weekend because we sure did! We drove to Fernandina on Friday to enjoy the Annual Shrimp Festival. Good food, live music, crafters from all over the U.S. and all the lovely boutiques that line the street make for a great time. Here we are by the Pirate Ship

On Saturday we went to downtown Jacksonville for World of Nations for more yummy food, crafts from all over the world, cultural dances and music. We had an amazing service at church Sunday and saw I don't even know how many people get baptized!

While at the Shrimp Festival we were walking around when I spotted a guy selling burlap sacks. I've always wanted to take a sack with cool graphics and words and make a bag from it. I found a blog by this amazing lady who uses potato sacks for some of her bags and picked one of the free patterns she shared and spent literally all day yesterday sewing this bag.

Since I was using burlap I had a few things I knew I needed to do. I couldn't treat the burlap like cotton or home décor fabric and if I ironed the fusible fleece to the back of the burlap the white would show through. So I cut my pieces for the front and back exterior pieces a little larger than needed.

I then took rust colored fabric cut out in the pattern piece, and sewed it to the back of the burlap, then cut the burlap out according to the pattern piece.

The piece for my exterior back had a few small holes, as all coffee bean bags will, so I made square patches, zig zagged them to the back behind the holes, then applied fray check and set it aside to dry.

I cut out all the other pieces for the bag, and there are a lot of em!

I applied the fusible fleece to the back of my exterior pieces which is also backed by the rust fabric and proceeded from there. I have always loved a recycled or upcycled project! Who knew a 3.00 coffee bean bag could make such a cute purse?! I used scrap fusible fleece that I almost previously threw away which turned out to be barely enough, but enough. I used left over home décor fabric from another project. I love the 3 compartment interior pockets and the side pockets with the bows.

I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to make with the rest of these but I think I see some totes and other purses in my near future. You can check my fb page and Etsy shop over the next week or two, or if you're a maker, here's where I found the pattern.     http://www.crystelleboutique.com/sewing-patterns.html         

Blessings, Gina