The Nani Iro side pocket bag giveaway

I wanted to celebrate the kickoff of my new sewing blog with a sewing giveaway! And what better day to do it than President's Day? It's like the largest, most commercial holiday ever. So in honor of Abe Lincoln, a Japanese pattern made up for you.

The Nani Iro side pocket bag ~

I have a bunch of Japanese pattern sewing books and I've always been too intimidated to try one. The language barrier! I can type Swedish or Italian into Babel Fish for translation but Japanese? No way.

So you can imagine how happy I was to find a free download translated Nani Iro bag pattern on the Magpie Patterns website!

I had this Japanese linen/cotton strawberry print fabric in my stash, and while I cut most of it up to make the Colette Parfait dress (more on that later in the week I hope), I had enough leftover to make this bag.


If you decide to sew your own, here are some tips I can give you -

1) The measurements are in centimeters! I know, you all probably knew that already but after measuring out 25 inches for the height and thinking "holy cow, this is the biggest handbag I've ever seen," I looked at it again and realized 25 cm made so much more sense.

2) I interfaced this bag with regular strength fusible interfacing. If I were to make it again I'd use a heavier sew-in interfacing. It's a soft bag and my preference would be for it to have more body.

3) It doesn't call for any interior pockets so I added an inside pocket with a welt opening. I would have used a zipper closure, but that's where the button was to be sewn on and I wasn't sure if it would interfere.

4) I think this would be super cute as a shoulder bag, too. If you lengthened the handles by another six or ten inches, and adjusted the curves of the lines, it would work. You know, I've come up with so many things I could do differently next time I just may have to make this again some day.
The pleated side pockets would be perfect for carrying a diaper case, or a book or Blackberry.

It would make a great bag for carrying knitting/crocheting/embroidery projects with you.

Here's how to enter the giveaway and win the bag:

1) Simply leave a comment here for one entry.

2) If you leave a link to this blog or this post on your own blog, and copy your link in your comments you'll automatically get three entries to win.

3) If you are a follower and comment, you'll get another entry.

I hope that's not too confusing? So one entry for comment, two entries for followers who comment and three if you mention this post on your own blog and link back to it.

I'll be traveling this week for work, so the contest ends on Friday, February 19, 2010 at 5:00pm CST. I'll post the winner on Saturday morning, cause it might take me that long just to figure up the entries! Yikes, how do people do this? If you're from outside the U.S., don't worry. I'll ship it to you, too.

Thanks for your support and happy sewing ~