Embroidered denim bag - or is it a skirt?

I came across a delicious embroidered denim skirt in a charity shop one day - it was too nice to leave there so I brought it home.  I spotted its potential from a mile off!

Of course I immediately thought - bag - but I wasn't quite sure where to start - what with all those thick seams between the gores and everything.

Those roses are quite something, aren't they?

After much humming and harring I eventually figured out that I could cut the skirt between two gores and keep the design relatively straightforward.  I just had to go with what I'd been given on this one!

What I hadn't banked on was that each of those gores not only had a different hem length but they also were different widths!  That had me scratching my head as to how to do that, but I finally identified two sets of mildly equal gores and began cutting the skirt up.

 

The front of the bag lent itself more to a label so I used the three rose panel for the front and the four rose panel for the back.  Sure I could have made two bags (I have enough roses left over to open a florists!) but I wanted this bag to be special.

 

Initially the bottom corners of the bag were pointy but I curved the edges slightly to give it a better shape while still making sure that the rose embroidery wasn't cut into.

While on a different foray into a charity shop I discovered a teal coloured sheet.  It virtually begged me to be used as the lining for a bag.  I love the denim and teal together - must be my new favourite colour combination!

There's even a pocket in there too!

I chose not to add a magnetic snap fastener as the top of the bag is quite narrow anyway due to the constraints of the gores.

Oh, and I needn't have worried about the thick seams on the gores - my needle was fine with them and they virtually disappeared in the end result.

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