Skirt Bag

Years ago, I had some wool skirts that didn’t fit me too well, but I liked the fabric so I ripped them up thinking that I would use the fabric someday. That day finally came. I decided I needed a new tote bag since my old one was raggedy and gross, and thought this was a good opportunity to use up that wool fabric.

I had three fabrics from wool skirts to use, a black, a dark gray and a red. I ironed them and measured them to see how much fabric was available to me and sketched out a design for the bag.

I realized that I didn’t have quite enough fabric from my repurposed skirts. So I decided to use some vintage wool fabric my grandmother gave me. The checkered red, gray and cream fabric matched well with my color palette. The one problem was that the fabric had quite a few moth holes, so I had to position my cut outs just right. I barely had enough fabric.

After I had sewn the fabric panels together, I saw that one of the black fabric blocks had a moth hole smack dab in the middle. This was unfortunate as I had already cut the fabric and didn’t have enough to replace the damaged piece. So first I used some thread to sew over the hole, hoping to patch it enough that it wouldn’t expand. Sadly, this looked like a pimple breaking out on a forehead. I didn’t like the way it looked and wanted to cover it up.

So I decided to put a pocket on top of it. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to do this because I wanted the bag to be simple. And quite frankly, I dislike useless pockets. And I’m never using this pocket…for anything. However, it fulfilled its purpose of covering my moth hole. [Sigh.]

The red fabric in the handle wasn’t initially part of my design. However, the black strips of fabric for the handle seemed short to me, and as I didn’t have any more black fabric, I could only use what I had left, which was the red.

When I pinned the straps to the bag, the thickness of the fabric concerned me. I didn’t think my sewing machine would handle it well, so I decided to hand sew it. Unfortunately, my hand sewing skills aren’t very pretty. I used embroidery floss to help cover my poor stitching.

The bag is reversible. At first, I thought I wanted the black and gray side to be on the outside of the bag, but I soon realized that I preferred the red side more. The bag is a bit larger than I anticipated, but it fits everything I need.