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April 12, 2005

Dissection

Just before last quarter finished, I found a neat little bag at the dollar store. So I bought two. One to use as a bag (the perfect size to carry a smallish knitting project, or use as a purse now that it'd getting too hot to wear a coat all the time), and one to take apart and analyse. So this evening I settled in with the seam ripper and my monkey brain, and took the thing apart.

Of course, the first thing to note is that I bought this bag for a dollar, and the store is still in business, which means it must have been made for a cost considerably less than a dollar. I would guess at the cost being about 25 cents, actually. There's about 1/2 yard of fabric in there, and instead of your standard interfacing, they sewed in cardboard, and all rather roughly. There were no finished edges on the piece, just rough edges tucked in.

The fabric seemed to be pink canvas, but once the piece was apart, it turned out to be the wrong side of pink fake leather, which is actually quite a clever trick, since the bag is styled too casually to work in leather. I bet that stuff comes in massive, cheap rolls, and they have a ton of it. The lining was a very cheap acetate. The zipper was a rough cut, with a bit of the fabric sewn over it to cover the end.

I think I'm going to take the pieces and make a nice bag using them as a pattern. I'll have to completely rework the lining, of course, and merely sticking the handle on the side is not really very classy, either, so I'll have to detail that. But apart from that, taking the bag apart showed me how fast something like that can be made. Certainly, the poor girl who sewed it together somewhere in Asia spent no more than ten minutes on it.

Now I just have to decide whether I want to go for funky and weird all over, or plain outside with hidden funky and weird inside.

Posted by ayse on 04/12/05 at 8:15 PM