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I picked out the fabric for this before I even had the pattern in hand.  How perfect, right? Birdie fabric for birdie sling!  This bag came out quite nice, actually!  I was exhausted by all the cutting, though.  Took me hours to do that.  It wasn’t so much the fabric that took all the cutting time, but all the interfacings!  There were lots for this pattern.  But, that being said, I’ll definitely make it again and again.  I get compliments on this bag all the time!  It has a really nice feel to it and hangs so well!  I just hope that I”ll get faster as I get more experienced!

All was grand until I got to the point where you sew the lining and exterior together.  I had misread the instructions to say “place handle INSIDE of exterior” when it actually read “place handle OUTSIDE of exterior, between itself and lining” (or something like that, but you get the idea!).  So I sew it up all, then clip it, and when I pull the lining through, I have a totally closed off bag with no handle to be found!  I had to cut it all up and continue from that step all over again.  Even though that major screwup happened, the bag still came out GREAT! The upper edge piece is just a little shorter than what it was supposed to be, but I love it all the same.

The part I found the most challenging was lining up the curved edge of the top red pieces to the curved edge of the exterior and lining pieces.  These curves went in opposite directions, and I kept thinking that there was a mistake.  No, I’m just naive. It was challenging, but not too much so, and of course, it came out just beautifully! I learned that you just start by pinning in the center, and slowly coerce the fabric to turn as you need it to.  Bending the top piece up helped its bottom edge to give into the curve.