The girl behind the Lama: Adventures with buckram

So where did my store start?

It all started with the batik purses. I found this cute purse pattern at the Quilting Connection (http://www.quiltingconnect.com/Quiltedpursesandtotebagpatterns.htm) a few months ago and I bought the Sara Satchel pattern. I just love to mix and match fabrics together and what easier way to do that than with batiks?

So to the store I went and I came back with all this material and this stuff called buckram which, by the way, I had never heard of in my life. One weekend later I had my first bag! I didn't like some of the measurements so I decided to kind of make it up as I went along. It did eventually go together and it was a functioning purse. It ended up being about 28" wide by 18" tall and 5 " deep. I had pockets on the inside and outside. Some i used a double layer of interfacing, some none at all. So some pockets were way too stiff, others definitely not stiff enough. It definitely wasn't anything to write home about, but it was cute. This only took the idea of possibly selling the bags and the discovery of etsy for me to start revamping the pattern to something I liked a lot better. Now my bag houses all of my small etsy projects I have for sale.

I'm always thinking about the big picture so I started to figure out how I could maximize my materials for the cost of the bag. First the bag got smaller so that I could use my fabric a bit more economically. A bag that was only 22 inches wide definitely made more sense than one that was 28 inches because now I could cut my pieces out of 1/2 yard of matierial instead of a yard. I also lost a few pockets on this version, they just didn't look right on the outside of the bag. Finally, I shortened the handles because, again, who wants to use two pieces of fabric when you could use just one? Things were starting go come together!

Then came the buckram adventures. I thought it would make much more sense to get the buckram that was 60" wide rather than the 20" because it was again cheaper. Bad idea. For two products that have the same name ... they were very, very different. The orginal 20" buckram that I used was very easy to work with. Stiff, but not too stiff. The 60" stuff was much stiffer, harder to work with and almost had a plastic feel to it. Absolutely horrible to sew with. I broke 4 needles on this stuff! Long story short, I gave up on my "economy" buckram and I ran back to Vogue before they closed to go back to my treasured 20".

In the end I tweaked the sizes to the smaller version and redesigned the pockets so they were more stable and held a cell phone and my new iPod perfectly. I will not be using the 60" buckrum any more. In the end, I think it came out pretty well! To date I have 3 for sale on my site. I think I'll hold off on making any more until a few get purchased, but you can bet I have ideas for other new bags already in the works!!

Finished product!!