Enormous Craft Bag

Hi everyone!
Finally my craft bag is finished!! I wanted to make a large bag to carry my crafts around, whether it be to sewing group or bring along to a sewing show to not have to carry all those purchases in lots of plastic bags. This project has been on my pile of UFOs for a while now and I was finally hit by the inspiration fairy :)

I love how it came out!

Small background story: a long long time ago in a galaxy far away... LOL nah just in the outskirts of London at Hobbycraft, I found this fabric on sale. I immediately loved it, so I bought one meter (this way when I still bought whole meters and thought I would actually use it all!) and planned on a cool bag. That was many moons ago and since then I have not just fallen out of love with it, I have plummeted. It doesn't have purple ;) Somehow the colour scheme really annoyed me and I never really used it since. Until one day I started making the scissor socks and used some of this fabric for them, it was after all perfectly themed for that kind of project. While going through my stash, I found this wonderfully cute measuring tape fabric that I'd bought at one of the sewing shows. Again, they weren't really my colours but it had a good price and I bought it on a whim. Good thing I did because they two just kind of came together. The bow is a different story. I always wanted to use this ribbon on this bag but in a different way. Now with the new top bit of the bag, the ribbon idea had to be changed. I ended up with this bow with some cute embellishments. I wasn't sure in the beginning if it was a good idea, but now I love it. The bag gets really big when full and then the bow gets smaller ;) But enough of my ramblings, I took some detailed pics too of course:

I LOVE coloured zippers! This blue is pretty much the same as the blue in the fabric which is great, and I also found this cute scissor button in orange! I once bought teensy split rings on ebay and used those to attach the button to the zipper.

So the scissors 'cut' the zipper open when you pull it. I think it's genius! You may or may not notice that the handles have two different colours (one marooney, one purpley). This actually has a reason, which is that I bought these exact fabrics to go with plan A re the ribbon. Now that the plan has changed, I still wanted to use the chosen fabrics and this was the best way. Plus I now have a tiny bit of purple ;) The inside of the handles have cord that I also had in my stash.

Yes I love the bow. One of my friends told me 'this is not a subtle bag'. It's very true but then it's not supposed to be subtle ;) I made the bow, and then sewed on a disc of the measuring tape fabric and three yoyos that I had in my yoyo stash (yes, I have a yoyo stash). On top there is a tiny button in the shape of a spool of thread. In blue to match the bag.

During our annual fabric shopping trip with the sewing group, I found a remnant of this green polka dot fabric and it was perfect for the inside of the bag.

The pattern I used was a scaled version of the tiny clutch bag by From an Igloo. Luckily it was already cut as that pattern can now only be access by the blog owners request whose contact details I can't find anywhere... 

I absolutely love this bag. It's had its first outing (more on that later) and it's proven its worth already. I took it to the sewing show a few days ago and it was brilliant.

This just goes to show that using up current stash is actually a really good idea :) Somehow this project turned into quite the stash buster. I'm slowly getting through my fabrics and actually end up with some really great things. Fingers crossed for more excellent projects soon!

UPDATE: My bag was featured on A Round Tuit :) *very proud*