Paper pieced clutch

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of testing a lovely pattern by Sara from SewSweetness. It was my first attempt at paper piecing and I was a little apprehensive about it initially. The pattern is suitable for someone as a first time paper piecing project but there were a couple of emails back and forth to Sara for some help getting me started and she was wonderful about helping me out and giving me some more resources to get the process down. Ultimately she directed me to a series that she had hosted on her blog about paper piecing and there were some great tutorials there, especially one writen by Sara herself.

After the process clicked with me, I kinda felt like a dunce for it seeming so difficult at first. I guess I have a tendency to over complicate simple things some times.

Since this was a Sunset clutch, I wanted the fabrics to be reminscent of an actual sunset. I dug around in my stash and found some yellow polka dots I had picked up from Hobby Lobby and a Thomas Knauer print that seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

Once I got the process down, it came together quickly and I ended up with the four panels for the clutch:

After a trim:

Now that the "hard part" was overm it was time to actually construct the clutch. Sara mde some great recommendations for interfacing choices, but I went a little rogue and decided that I wanted a bag with a LOT of structure and I went with some Peltex 71. I wouldn't say that it was a terrible choice, but it wasn't one of my best ideas. The stabilizer is so rigid that when working with a smaller bag like this, it was the equivalent of wrestling a baby alligator to negotioate some parts of the bag through my machine.
I ended up ripping out all the top stitching at the top of the bag because it was virtually impossible to get a clean even top stitch with the small nature of the bag combined with the peltex 71. After all was said and done I decided to do some by hand with some embroidery floss (not pictured), which did turn out well but my poor fingers hurt for the whole next day.


However, I am overall happy with how it turned out. I love the fabrics together and it is really a GREAT pattern. Even though I tested the "rough" draft, it was so well done! Easy to follow with great pics along the way, this was such a fun project, I can't wait to do another one.