Mon Dieu! Tres chic! or something like that....

Most of my sewing adventures lately can be categorized as challenging.  Not exactly technically difficult to execute, but requiring a little more thinking (which I'm not always feeling).  The good part about this is that my thinkers usually come out better because I take my time and pay a decent amount of attention to what I'm doing.  This also applies to things I've made bunches of already because there's always gotta be a twist.

A lovely crafty co-worker brought to me a pretty scarf she had bought for almost nothing--it was a black meshy sort of fabric with a flocked Parisian print on it (yours truly of course forgot to take a picture of it).  It was too small to wear as a decent scarf, but even so the print would have been lost in the folds.  She wanted to use it for something, though, as she adores it.  The solution?  Purses (did you have any doubts there?)!  It was just the right size to coax two small purses out of it.  I couldn't just sew the scarf as it wouldn't last a day, so as a stabilizer she decided on a plain hot pink fabric underneath it.  When I went to put these together the mesh was a little thicker than I thought so the pink wasn't as vibrant, but it gave it this look that I don't even know what you'd call it:

The black over the pink makes the photo look highly pixellated, but the sheen is so much more even in actuality.

A slight change in the lighting makes this glasses case look a bit more purple.

To deal with the possible fraying of the scarf, I cut that piece last so it wouldn't have time to change its mind about staying together.  I then immediately applied Fray Check to all of the edges.  It seemed a bit excessive as it held together really well, but if I had skipped this part, with my luck I'd have had a pile of thread on my hands.  Other than that and being really careful about getting all the edges in the seams, it was business as usual.  I had to be verrrry careful with the glue because I don't think picking it off this fabric would have turned out as well as with plain old cotton.  They're sturdy little buggers--that extra layer, thin as it is, added some thickness to it--and they're already interlined with fleece.

For the lining my plan was to add this fun Michael Miller print:

'La Tour Eiffel' in Paris Pink. Yum!

When I got to the store this print was entirely too large to work at the small scale of these purses, and there was nothing comparable.  So I went with something much more basic, but with the same colors and hopefully a bit of the same feel:

It's not an ideal match, but the lining is invisible until you open the purse, so no biggie.  
I like shooting the linings of these bags because they look like big huge muppet mouths.

And that, said Bee, is that.