Ninety nine cents well spent

I was working browsing the archives of sewing blogs last week and found out that one of my favorite creative bloggers Creative Little Daisy had written a pattern for Simplicity!  Even better, it was a pattern I had picked up during a JoAnn 99-cent sale a few weeks before.  Huzzah!

Now, I'm not excellent at following bag patterns, and most of the time I feel like commerical patterns are written in a language that I don't totally understand, but I wanted to rush right home and give this one a try!  So, a week later, I did just that. 

I bought a scrap pack from Anna Maria Horner that I think would look amazing paired with a natural linen as View C of this pattern (Simplicity 2617), but I didn't want to waste them if I couldn't follow the directions, so I opted for some stashed scraps and a few strips of white linen that I had on hand so that I could test it out.  The lining is plain ol' unbleached muslin. 

I ended up making View B, not C (like I wanted), because the linen strips I had were too small to accommodate View C and I even had to shorten the sides and gusset of the bag I made by about an inch.  Like we've already discussed, I'm stingy, and I didn't want to cut into something brand new.  Then, since I was just testing the pattern out, and also because I am l-a-z-y, I didn't want to take up a bunch of time making a zippered inner pocket, so I opted for a patch pocket instead.  Finally, I stitched a double line near the edges of the handle and didn't stitch the rest of the lines that the pattern called for. 

I'm not head over heels with all of the fabrics, but I do like the shape of the bag and I like that it's roomier inside than it looks.  I carry a lot of stuff, you see, and I need a place to put it all.  View C is still more my style than this version of the bag, so I'm going to end up making anyway.  I'm nothing if not a sucker for making things more complicated, so by testing this out and having it work fairly well, I've just created even more work for myself.  Neat.