Tea Towel Shoulder Bag

Ta Da!  I’ve finished another Tea Towel Challenge project. 

When I visited Jenny’s blog yesterday and saw the lovely diary cover she had made (there is even a tutorial) I decided to finally use my tea towel with the same design on it.

The tea towel was a freebie with Country Style a few months ago.  It was so pretty that I planned straight away to make a bag out of it.  I was just going to make a bag similar to the green supermarket variety, using some other other bits a bobs I had…..but….I dithered around……. I didn’t have quite enough of one fabric, and it all seemed to be just too hard, so I put it away.

As a result of Jenny’s challenge I brought it all out again, but got no further, so ended up making the oven mitt instead.

When I saw how lovely Jenny’s project made up I thought some more and ended up using Jodie’s tutorial for a “One Hour Bag” which fitted onto the tea towel perfectly. 

I tweaked the pattern a bit to add a button and loop and made the strap much longer.  Believe me, being such a ditherer, it took well over one hour to make, but I did make it from start to finish last night……..only to decide this morning that I didn’t like the way the strap had turned out (there wasn’t enough left of the tea towel, so I had originally used the brown floral lining fabric, but the contrast was just too great), so I went and found another fabric from the stash and am much happier with the result. 

The vintage buttons are from the jars that live on Grandma’s treadle machine in our lounge room. 

Once again, I have used what I have, even down to a long thin strip of batting for the strap and is another finish for the OPAM Challenge.

I’m off to my craft group this afternoon, so hopefully I will get some more stitching done then.