DIY; Carpet Clutch

Sometimes the best inspiration comes from those around you. 

I've been in a home redecorating mood lately. Getting ready for winter making our place cozy and warm and well lit to compensate for time change.  This started with a good old fall cleaning and temporarily ended with the purchase of a new couch!  A new couch which then brought on a spree of re-arranging, re-furnishing, shelf building, lamp hanging and so on.  All of which has occupied the majority of my free time and creativity.

 Since then I've been in a bit of a creative lull, could be that all I want to do is hang out on my new couch but I've spent hours upon hours searching my favourite blogs (and new ones) for a good DIY idea and nothing has come to me.  Until this afternoon my lovely friend Sara stopped by for a quick pillow case making lesson/session with some great provence printed material.  But pillow cases really aren't the point here (though we did document the making of them which I was planning to post this evening) the point was that all I needed was a simple sewing project to get me back in the project mood.  

Materials needed:

Piece of Carpet 1ft x 1ft' 3 inches

Piece of material for lining

Old belt or inch wide strip of leather 2 inches longer then carpet

Jewellery making head pin, with decorative top 

Pins

Thread

Scissors

Needle Nose pliers

Speed-Sew glue, or other strong adhesive

Cut your lining about an inch wider then the piece of carpet your using. Fold under each side to make the lining just smaller then the carpet.

place the lining on top of the carpet with the nicer side of each facing outwards. Using your sewing machine stitch along each side of the material as show above. 

Fold the lined carpet as shown above, I left about 7 cm for the flap. 

 Stitch from A to B and from C to D, then turn your clutch carpet side out.

Pin then sew from A to B on either side of the clutch (shown above)

Lay out your strip of leather with the rough side facing up, leaving an extra 2 inches sticking out above the flap.

 Glue and pin leather as shown above and below,  leave the last 2 inches of the leather without glue.

Use a sewing pin to poke a hole through the leather and carpet, you may need to work it through a few times to fit the head pin.  Push the head pin through to the inside of the clutch.

Clip off some excess of the head pin leaving about 1 cm sticking out.

With your needle nose pliers turn the rough edge of the pin down to make a small loop.

Xo Austere