A Sketchbook Satchel for NYC

Alaina is heading to NYC early Saturday morning with a group of art students from Waubonsie.  I KNOW!  How fun!  They are going to spend hours visiting the fabulous museums there and doing other fun touristy things.  Tiffany, who is going to be Alaina's roommate at BYU next year is going too.  The girls figure this will be a good trial run and have already started sharing and working out a good compromise.  Tiffany wants to check her bag and Alaina is going to pay her $10 each way to carry her toiletries.  That way Alaina won't have to deal with carrying the minimum travel size that the TSA requires since she just wants to bring a carry-on.

Alaina wanted a bag to carry her sketchbook and pencils in, but also wanted it big enough to hold her wallet and a couple of other minimal necesseties (the Girl is NOT a purse carrier).  I thought it would be fun to try to make one for her.  So I went to my favorite place (Google!) and pulled up a couple of tutorials that showed exactly how to do this.  I let her choose from fabric that I already had at home and this is what we came up with.

I think it turned out really cute.  Alaina loved the giraffe print, but that cotton was way too weak to make the whole bag out of it.  So we combined it with the stripe and the polka dot and just used the giraffe print as the fun accent fabric (the colors actually match better in real life).  I added fusible interfacing to every piece of fabric on the outside of the bag.  I also doubled the bottom layers and quilted the layers together for extra strength.   

The messenger bag / sketchbook satchel was created from three different tutorials and piecing together parts from each.
MMMCrafts had good basic instructions and line drawings to follow, this was the main tutorial that I followed.
Heart of Mary had very good pictures but I wasn't about to try to insert a zipper into my first attempt at making a bag
Bluebirdbaby actually has each step broken out with an accompanying picture.

The tutorial for the fabric flower was found at Little Birdie Secrets

p.s.  I have more pictures, but it's late and Rob is very tired because he didn't sleep well on his trip this week and he's trying really hard not to get impatient with me.  Since I have work tomorrow, I knew if I didn't get this post up tonight, it might not get up at all, so I only put up one picture.  If you want to see more details let me know and I'll come back and edit this.