After about 700 yards of purple thread, three false starts, two broken sewing machine needles, three packages of bias tape, a half-dozen thread snarls, 180 hand-stuffed trapunto cells, and at least three episodes of damaging completed elements, I finally completed this dragon-themed diaper bag. (Yay!)
I made the bag for @Manders in the recent Make-a-Bag-and-Fill-It swap. She just had an adorable baby girl, and asked for a diaper bag. She said her favorite color was purple, and that the nursery theme would be dragons. How cool!
When I was collecting ideas online, I ran across this designer bag (Levy model from Happ):
I fell in love with the puffer-style details immediately, and knew I wanted to do something similar. But…
I couldn’t figure out what fabric to use.
I couldn’t find a pattern that looked similar.
I wasn’t sure how to do the high-relief quilting on the pockets.
As I so often do, I plunged ahead anyway. In hindsight, probably shouldn’t have tried to “wing it” with no pattern when I am (at best!) a late beginner/early intermediate sewist.
Cannot tell you how long I searched for “the right fabric.” (And never really found it.) I went to six different fabric stores in several different towns, asked advice on Reddit, ordered four different things off Etsy or Amazon (one of them ended up being a nasty-feeling kite fabric. Blech!) Finally went with a micro-woven “membrane nylon” for the interior and clearance-bin bedsheets (!) for the exterior.
A few progress shots:
There was SO much hand-sewing! My machine just wasn’t capable of sewing many of the required seams. I bought a walking foot for it (which helped with the quilting parts, but of course didn’t magically make my machine able to sew through greater thicknesses!)
In the end, it was all worth it! I love how the bag turned out, despite its various wonkinesses. I love the striped zippers and the seat-belt strap. I love that it converts from a shoulder bag to a backpack. I love the mesh pockets.
I hope @Manders finds it useful. Think I might take a break from making bags for a while! (This one literally took weeks longer than expected.)
I’m just…in absolute awe of this project. Wow.