A Purse of My Own

For many years now I have been creating juice pouch purses and selling them to people, telling them how wonderful they are. They are stylish, fun, unique, and durable. But for these past years I have not been practicing what I preach. I have not been using a juice pouch purse on a daily basis. I have never made one to call my own, but that is all about to change. I have decided that it is finally time to make a purse for myself and I have chosen some very special juice pouches to make it out of.
As I have mentioned before I started collecting juice pouches when my son was in kindergarten. Now he is finishing up second grade and it has taken 3 years to collect the juice pouches that I am using for my purse. These pouches are like little gems. I could never find a store in my area that sold this particular juice pouch. They sold the brand but not the flavor, and yet they showed up in my recycle bin one at a time. I managed to only get eight of these rare and precious gems over the course of three years. Eight out of thousands of juice pouches that we collected and I am convinced that I will not be finding any more because the flavors that I could find in the stores have all had their packaging changed.

I know what you are thinking. Eight juice pouches are not enough to make a purse, and you would be right. But, I have a solution to that problem that you can use whenever there are not enough juice pouches and you do not want to mix styles of pouches. For this purse, as I have done with others, I decided to use the silver side of the pouch to fill in for the lack of matching pouches. I didn't want to use any other colors of juice pouches because I wanted the rare juice pouches to be the stars. In the purse inspired by my shoes I used the silver side because the stitching was more predominate on that side but in the past I have used the silver side of the pouch to make straps and other things. Using juice brands that are in great supply in order to save my fewer colors.
The design of the purse that I decided on is similar to the purse inspired by my favorite pair of shoes. I used the same quilting technique but I put all of the "right" side pouches at the top of the purse and all of the silver "wrong" sided pouches at the bottom of the purse. Instead of a double strap I decided to do a single strap just long enough to throw over my shoulder.
I had a little trouble deciding on what kind of a closure to do at the top of the bag. I wanted as much of the apple juice pouches to show but I wanted a flap to close as much of the top of the purse as possible. The result was a flap with a magnetic snap that was half the size of a juice pouch with the corners folded in.
I finished off the bag by lining the inside with my standard off white cotton fabric with red ribbon around the top rim and burgundy accent buttons. Now I can proudly show off my craft every day and enjoy the occasional compliment that I enjoy when I am testing out a new bag and I can stop feeling like a hypocrite when I tell people how wonderful and functional they are. I can proudly tell them that I carry one every day and that they should too.