It’s A Cinch Tote Bag!

So I finished this a while ago and put a pic on instagram, but am just catching up on the blog!

Way back when I won a quilty voucher for Pink Chalk Fabrics, it was a happy day!

I had been wanting to make myself a new bag for a while so I invested in some beautiful Lisa Congdon fabric. Then set about searching for something suitable.

The bag had to be:

• Big but not too big
• An over the shoulder style
• Zip up-able
• Able to frame the fabric
• And…a little bit of a challenge

I found this in the It’s A Cinch Tote from Uhandbag.

I must say that I definitely found it a challenge, mainly because I kept making stupid mistakes or didn’t have the right stuff.

I managed to order the wrong number of clips, then didn’t have enough interfacing, stitched a zip tab on the wrong zip and managed to iron over the PLASTIC zip….whoops….(amazingly this wasn’t all). Luckily it survived!!

The instructions are pretty long though and I had to read some parts over, but they were clear on the whole. If you’ve made a bag or purse before you will find this quite simple.

I did find that the pictures didn’t match up properly with the instructions and some were on a different page. Once I got my head round this it was ok.

The only thing that was new to me was adding the straps. I did mess up a bit here as for some reason I only checked to make sure they matched up at the top, not the bottom so they miss a little but it’s no big deal. One to remember for next time!

This bag has already got much use. Although smaller than I expected it’s the perfect size for all my essentials and feels more robust that the standard tote.

I would really like to make another with some FMQ. I did think about quilting this one, but I wasn’t in the mood at the time!

 Linking up with NTT!