New Purse-Simplicity Pattern

In the middle of everything, I wanted a new hands-free purse.  Simplicity has a pattern which I had purchased some time ago.  A kind person on Freecycle gave me two bags of fabric scraps a month or more ago in which was a lovely piece of tapestry upholstery fabric.  I thought the two should be married.

WELL, it was not all hunky-dory but I did get a purse made.  Here is a badly-Photoshopped picture of the completed project:

The brown is where I was trying to knock out the public restroom where I took the photo.  For some reason, without doing any funny stuff, well, except the magic wand tool used erroneously, there was brown all over the front of the purse and my skirt.  Oh, well, I think you can see the purse.

A little tip:  multiple layers of upholstery tapestry make for a VERY thick fabric.  Thank goodness I did not listen to the directions and put on the fusible fleece layer, too!

You cannot tell but there are two pockets on the front (you CAN see the little velcro strip on the right side which is for the iPod pocket, but I use a nice thick little case for my iPod so, while the encased iPod fits in the pocket, I cannot velcro it shut...so I tuck in the flap around the iPod.

On the left is a nice cell phone pocket, which works really great, except that I may be cell-phone-less pretty soon, unless the TracFone people come through.  The nice TracFone I purchased (and received) last week is one with a nice sliding QWERTY keyboard, a 2.0 mp camera, etc, PLUS a SIM card, whatever that is, and TracFones with SIM cards do NOT work in my neighborhood, unless I go outdoors (which is what the nice TracFone customer service representative told me....no SIM card phones work inside houses in our area--which is one-half mile from a cell tower...figure that one out!), and outdoors anywhere near our house there is no signal at all, either!  Of course, I did not walk down to the end of the driveway, or out to the road, because somehow that sort of takes away the joy of a cell phone.

TracFone is kindly sending me a refurbished cell phone which is supposedly in transit now.  I will be sending back the semi-expensive phone we purchased last week, for sure!  I wonder what the phone will have for attractions.  I told them I wanted the sliding keyboard (because I am old and not great at text messaging...but want to do it!!) but could live without the better camera, since I have a digital camera that goes with me everywhere.

OK...this post has gotten way out of control!  Time to call it a day on this one!

One (or two) last note on the new purse, because I did not have a magnetic closure devise in the first place, and in the second place, because the fabric was too thick to make it work,  AND because I don't do well with open purses, I made a little zippered bag to hold all the stuff that was going to be in the purse part and not in all the pockets.

By the way,  notice the cool zipper pocket in the strap...perfect place for money clip and credit cards...really tough for a thief to grab them...also, the black vertical strip between the cell phone and iPod pockets is a zipper for a pocket behind those pockets, PLUS there is another zippered pocket inside where I carry the camera and charger.  I love this purse.

One drawback with the purse is that the purse itself is heavy, then adding camera, phone, iPod, chargers, handkerchief, etc makes if VERY heavy on my shoulder. I may become stoop-shouldered!  If you see me wearing the back, remind me to stand up straight!

One other (and really the last thing I am going to say..)cool thing about the purse...I wear it in front of my belly like a belly pack when I am walking around (think security!) but when I am driving, I can just slide it to the left side so I can slide behind the wheel, something which would be impossible with the purse-as-belly-pack routine.  It must add at least a foot to my already considerable girth.