Salty Peanut Stitchery: Bowling Bag Inspired Purse

In an effort to make yet another purse that I probably don't need but that I thought would be really cool to make, I decided to try my hand at making a bowling bag inspired purse.

I wanted it to be smaller than a real bowling bag, but I don't think I sized it down quite far enough. It's a nice size and much smaller than the original pattern that I tweaked it from, but if I decide to try to resuscitate it one day I'm going to size it down a few more inches. If I would have stayed with the original pattern size it would have looked more like luggage than a purse.

I chose to use some beautiful baby blue vinyl that has a leather feel to it for the upper portion of the purse and a cream colored vinyl for the lower part and the handles. The lining is a sort of grey high pile upholstery fabric that I got on sale.

I really like the natural almost hemp looking piping that I chose. I didn't want to go too bright and shiny with the bag like some of the vintage bowling bags are, so I chose the piping to try to tone it down a bit. Maybe I'll make the next version blingy overkill with some metallic flake red vinyl. Hmmm....

I had to hand stitch the lining to the exterior at both ends of the zipper, so some of the stitching in those areas may look a little less than perfect. I added heavy interfacing (Pellon 926 I believe) to the lining and then also added some plastic canvas material in between the lining and exterior layers to give the bag even more structure. This, unfortunately, necessitated me having to try to stitch the lining to the zipper that I had already installed in the exterior. This would have been an easier proposal if the bag would have worked with me and my sewing machine, but all that interfacing and plastic canvas pretty much nixed that idea.

Do you like my little zipper pull and interior key holders? Can you tell what they are? They're some extra closures that are usually used on women's garters that I had lying around. I looked at them and thought, "That would make a cute and quirky little addition that not everyone would readily recognize". I even went so far as to sew the little plastic male part of the closure onto my keyring so that I can easily clip my keys to either the inside or outside holders.