You know as a female we have a few issues. One of them is going to a bar, concert or other crowded venue where you don’t want to hold onto your purse all night, but have more “stuff” than will fit in your pockets.
Skinny jeans, ugh. There is zero room in your pockets for really anything.
You know, like a huge ass phone. Remember when phones were going smaller? We seem to have gone full reverse on that one!
Solution: A Hip Bag/Pouch!
I searched on Pinterest, and there are a bunch of different kinds of these type of bags. I created a board for holding my favorites in one spot, since I want to make MORE.
Hey, I’ve got a bunch of leather, so I might as well use it, right?? Right.
This is my first try at this, and what I wanted was a belt that I could use separately from the pouch. I wanted to be able to take it off my hip.
I *might* make a tutorial for this, but it was quite trial and error on my first one. Plus, when you do a belt, you have to do it for your measurements, so you can’t just go with a “one size fits all”, because that is a misnomer. One size NEVER fits all.
This is pretty hardware heavy, so really not a cheap project. You need a belt buckle with the rectangle thing to hold the belt tail (obviously, I am good with technical terms), rivets, clasps and d-rings. I got a lot of it at Tandy Leather.
The insets were cut with my Silhouette machine, and were designs that I drew. It is kind of nerve racking cutting these out, since leather is touchy and if you mess up a cut…let’s just say it’s not a cheap mistake. My leather settings were Speed at 2, Knife at 10 and Thickness at 25.
Okay, so now a few things I need to do differently. I need to stitch around the outsides before putting everything together. That didn’t go so well trying to do that after the rivets were in. Stitching was definitely needed, although I glued the layers together. The edges will tend to get rubbed and it will rub loose.
Wondertape and glue is your friend. You can’t pin leather, though cloverclips or paperclips are quite helpful here. There were some spots that I couldn’t use either, so I had to use Wondertape. I need to get some leather cement, too. Mine is OLD. I couldn’t even get it out of the bottle.
The pouch has some shoddy stitching on it, since my machine was having a hard time getting it through some spots. I got a “new” Singer 401A, and it works great at getting through the areas. It does not have a teflon foot, though. I’m not sure they even made Teflon foots at that stage, so I am going to try to see if I can find a walking foot attachment for this machine.
The pouch is lined and I made a few pockets in the lining. My phone barely fits into this pouch, but it still works.
So, I totally love this bad boy, and hope it gets some use on upcoming concerts. I will likely make another one in a different style, just ’cause. I will have to wait on that, though. The next month is a mad-dash to get the kids’ costumes done. I got the boy measured and am on my way to getting the patterns done.
