Cork and fabric tote bag

So, as promised, today I'm going to tell you about my experience in making a bag with cork fabric.

 

I bought a roll of cork fabric a while ago, with no specific project in mind (this happens a lot when browsing through craft stores). Lately, as I've been making a lot of bags, I started to wonder if I could incorporate the cork fabric in there somehow. 

And this is the end result:

To make this type of bags you can follow my 20-minutes lined tote bag tutorial - other than the use of cork fabric and the tucked in bottom corners, everything else was made according to the tutorial.

I started with two 41 cm by 37 cm rectangles. Usually I like to cut fabric for these bags on fold, to avoid having a bottom seam, but in this case I couldn't do it because of the pattern (otherwise one of the sides of the bag would end up with the pattern upside down).

Once the bottom seam was done, I cut a smaller rectangle of cork fabric and centered it over said bottom seam, as shown below:

Ad then all I had to do was sew the cork fabric in place. One tip - once you punch a hole into the cork fabric it's hard to make that hole disappear. This means that using pins to secure it to the other fabric in preparation for sewing is not advisable. I used small pieces of scotch tape instead.

And then, it also means that you should get your sewing right the first time, as unpicking the seams may damage the cork fabric too much to be used again.

Here is the exterior piece of the bag once the cork fabric was duly secured in place (and with the side seams complete too):

Then all I needed was to sew the lining and the handles as per the tutorial, and my bag was finished.

This bag is available for purchase here.

Happy Tuesday!