Purse With Hungarian Style Embroidery Part 1

Purses are a fun accessory.  One nice thing about making them is that unlike clothes, they don't have to be fitted.  Pattern alterations are never necessary.  However, there are lots of fun changes you can make to a basic pattern to better suit your taste or intended use.

This purse was made using McCall's 7369.  I mostly used View A, but there were some pretty extensive modifications to the pattern.  The pattern calls suggests that the purses be made of pre-quilted fabrics, with lightweight cotton fabrics as contrast.  I've had good success making purses from microsuede.  This 100% polyester fabric is fairly easy to work with, quite tough, and best of all, goes through the laundry well.  We all know that purses end up in all kinds of places and can pick up some pretty nasty stuff.  Would it be nice to just toss them in the washing machine periodically?  With some care in choosing materials, that's very possible.  This purse is made with dark green and contrasting dark blue microsuede.  The lining is polyester/cotton broadcloth, a remarkably tough material.

Rather than use a decorative band of contrasting material, I chose to decorate the purse with embroidery.  With the right stabilizer, microsuede can take even rather dense embroidery designs.  I chose the Zala Flower Spray from Embroidery Library in the 9" x 4" size.  This size allows the design to be nicely centered on each side of the purse.

I used a 100% sized print of the design to select the exact location for the embroidery.  It's not centered on the panel.   I placed the attachment points for the handles on the piece before selecting the where to put the embroidery.  Particularly in the contrasting fabric, the attachment points reduce the apparent height of the purse.   

Selection of the embroidery thread is important to the success of the project.  Traditional Hungarian embroidery uses fairly bright, saturated colors.  I chose to use red, yellow, and orange matching the recommendations from Embroidery Library.  However, the purple and blue had to be just a shade lighter so they'd contrast well with the background.  The greens had to go a lot lighter than the original design.  I like to collect all of the threads together and lay them as a group on the fabric in natural light to see how well they work together.

For an embroidery like this, a proper stabilizer is critical.  Done properly, the stabilizer can also act as an interfacing for the whole purse.  Previously, I'd used a nice cut away stabilizer for applications like this, but stabilizers don't generally come in wide enough widths to be the interfacing for a purse this large.  I found a craft weight sew-in interfacing that was the right weight.  Using the interfacing as the embroidery stabilizer does help bond the two, a real advantage.  

Here's the machine, all ready to start the embroidery.  All the thread spools are lighted up in order, ready for thread changes.

In Part 2, I'll show you how the embroidered pieces got crafted into a purse shell and Part 3 will show the lining and finishing.