I can tell you, without a doubt, every guy I know now notices my sewing skills – since I started sewing with pleather and leather.

Spice of Life bag by Moonshine
This little beauty had 2 features that I love.
1: It was made by Sharon, Gail, Luci and a few Rhodes ASG sewers in 1 session earlier this year. 1 session only!
2: I got to use real leather and snake skin printed silk fabric leftovers as well as leftover bag strap, in the same colour as the leather.

Making up the internal pockets was dead easy using Steam a Seam 2 lite. Yes. There are two pockets for the phone and car keys. The linings has been interfaced with light-weight interfacing.

I bought the tubular handbag frame from Ghees online store and the zippers was from my Zipperstop stash that I bought in 2011. I’ve found a local bag frame supplier through ebay – Handbag Hardware Australia, making future Spice of Life bags cheaper to make.

My shoe repair guy and I are now BFFs because while he doesn’t work on handbags, he sewed up the final seam around the handles for me for $10 and he now has the contact details for NSW Leather.

Lucky for me, he was quiet when I went to see him to finish the final seam on my bag. The photo below shows how he’s winding the bobbin. It ran out of thread.

He was really understanding and his sewing machine was hand driven! So he had to hold the bag with all its layers with one hand and operate the machine with the other hand.

This classic bag style is a winner in my books. When I make this again in leather I will use one leather layer only for the bag frame so my machine can sew through it.

I did a bit of online bidding for more leather via Graysonline but stuck to my budget and didn’t result in a leather purchase, phew! That’s it for bag making for a while and my UFOs in 2012 are done – bar the computer bag that won’t get a look at until next year.