All in the bag

Hope you all enjoyed your Easter long weekend - It was beautiful Autumn weather in Sydney, perfect for eating :) 

I've been making bags again.....

I'm waiting on the go ahead on some quilts and happily making myself some smaller projects and testing out some skills in the mean time.

I loved the green corduroy bag I made in my previous post and whilst admiring it I was wishing it was leather...

Then thought to myself - how cool would a leather version be with Liberty lining!

and so a week later here we have it

a leather bag with Liberty of London lining made by me - I'm a little bit over excited about this project!

I used the Amy Butler Nappy bag pattern again.

and sourced my leather from 

NSW Leather Co in Sydney, Australia

with their advice I bought some really soft sheep skins ($25 each) - I needed two to complete this bag. I went for a nubuck feel with a ostrich finish effect.

The Nappy bag pattern is cut in two whole pieces and the strap is included, If you wanted you could have more cuts/ joins to use less material. 

I was a bit impatient and dove straight into my leather sewing - I did buy a leather needle and upholstery thread. The needle was great but the thicker thread kept getting gobbled up by my machine so I switched to a polyester sewing thread instead. 

I used my standard plastic foot on my machine which seemed to work fine (although did struggle at times) and had my walking foot engaged.I own a PFAFF Expression 4, which has a built in walking foot.If you own a different type of machine it might be worth using a walking foot?

I read somewhere that a teflon foot is good for sewing leather? If I make another bag I'll look into that a little more.

I had to adjust my stitch length all the way up to 6 - I usually sew on 2.5 for piecing and around 3.5/ 4 for quilting.

Make sure you do a few practice runs on the leather off cuts first.

The lining is Liberty of London Tana Lawn - the red Liberty Fabric was bought last October 2012 in London at the Liberty store its from the seasonal Tana Lawn range.

For the inside pockets and the outside pocket I used the off cuts of Liberty Tana Lawn that I had used in the Green Corduroy bag from the last post.

Leather and Liberty!

I LOVE it :)

Have you ever sewn with Leather?

Any advice or links to your projects?

I'd love to hear from you and see what you made

Xx Siobhan