Patchouli Moon Studio: text fabrics

Sunday, April 16, 2023

Sew Powerful Purses #18-26 (2023) & Say What? Blog Hop

Thank you Joan for hosting this Say What? Sew it-Show it Blog Hop. I knew what I was going to share right away (even though I needed to finish sewing them first, lol).

Most of you know I love making bags/purses and I am passionate about making and donating purses to the Sew Powerful Purse Project, which is a charity that sends the purses to Zambia and fills them with feminine hygiene products (that are made by seamstresses right there in Zambia and they get paid a living wage too). This enables the girls to stay in school all month/year long so they do not miss school anymore. That in turns enables the girls to continue with their education and allows local women to sew the reusable pads and to make soap that is needed for the girls. All those items (plus a couple of pair of underwear that is outsourced because the cost is less than making the underwear) is placed into each purse and handed out to the girls at the various schools in Zambia. This is an ongoing need forever.

So with that in mind, here are the purses that I made to donate with words on them. I used selvages for a lot of the purses, I also used a fabric panel that had lots of lovely Positive quotes on them, which is perfect for these purses too. The fabric panel has about half of just flowers as well as half with just quotes. Here is the panel I used:

Choose to Shine designed by Cherry Guidry

(I am also making flower flaps for the purses I am sewing now too).

I added strips around the panel quote to bring it up to the size needed for the flap. I added a handmade label and some embellishments too.

The main body of the purse and the lining can be seen here.

There is a front pocket on each purse. I like to make the Intermediate purse using the Beginner style flap as I can be more creative on the larger space on this flap. Flaps are interchangeable between the Beginner (boxed corner style) and the Intermediate (full gusset style) purses.

I took this photo when we had snow one morning.

I like to experiment with how I sew on the buttons I use for embellishing the purses too.

Next I made several purses using selvages. I like to play around with different settings for the selvages. I had a large scrap of that pink-blue-green-orange-white print, but not enough to make much out of, so I used it as the center of the flaps and because the colors in that print were also the colors in the main body of the purse, which is a fine wale corduroy print. I grabbed that corduroy print from a freebie table at my quilt group. The other fabrics used in these purses were fabrics that were directly donated to me by a couple of women from the Sew Powerful FB group.