How To Make the Most of a Simple Purse Design

Runaround Bag Lakehouse FabricsLazies, Our Runaround Bag is one of our simplest purse designs, but that doesn’t mean it has to look simple. Think of ‘simple’ as meaning ‘a blank palette waiting for your love’.

Dress-Up With Details
Here, we’ve dressed-up this small bag with three simple details. We made a funky shoulder strap, fussy cut our fabric to showcase the large floral and added a touch of ribbon to the zipper pull.

This simple shoulder strap technique might be just the answer for your next small bag project. I could have used some coordinating fabric to make the shoulder strap, but I wanted a little flair to go with the fun floral prints.

Use What You Have On Hand
So I reached for my stash of ribbon spools and pulled a few colors that matched the fabrics. Then I grabbed my size ‘I’ crochet hook and crocheted a length of simple chain stitches.

Click on the image of the bag to see the detail of the shoulder strap.

I chose three different widths of ribbon ranging from 1/8″ to 1/4″ wide. There’s no magic to my formula here. These were the sizes of the ribbons I had on hand. One of the ribbons has these cute little thread loops on the edges and that added a nice texture to the project.

Ribbons

Hold the three ribbons together and crochet as you normally would with one strand. Consider adding yarn or other fibers.

Chain stitch for the length you desire then knot the end. This shoulder strap is close to 40″ and it used a bit more than two yards of each of the three ribbons. Construct your bag project as you normally would and sew the ends of the strap to the bag. This is a great technique for short handles, too.

Add Color For Balance
I used a few leftover pieces of ribbon to embellish the zipper pull. Cut two or three 12″ pieces of ribbon. Trim one end to a point so they’re easy to feed through the zipper pull. Match all the ends and tie in a knot close to the pull.

Make Your Fabric Do The Work
I love the big flower on the front of the bag. Both of the prints you see are from Lakehouse Dry Goods. The big flower was just the right size for this project. The big yellow flower came from a panel of single flowers on a black background. Perfect – we’ll let the fabric is do all the work for us!

There was enough black fabric around the flower that I simply cut a piece of fabric big enough for this part of the project and I didn’t have to do anything else to it. The hardest part was choosing which of the fabulous flowers I liked the most.

I almost forgot to mention that the zipper is just a polyester all-purpose zipper from Coats & Clark.

Enjoy!

Joan

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