Crafty Kim: Sewing FO: In-town Handbag

I turned on the sewing machine to make a lemony tablecloth* for the front porch but ended up also making this purse:

Project stats:
Pattern: In-town Handbag from Amy Butler
Fabric: Exterior: some fabric I picked up in Australia (but it was made in England), Interior: same as exterior plus some plain cream fabric I had hanging around.
Time to make: Total: ~5 hours (about 2 hours to cut out and 3 hours to assemble)
Will I make this again? I think so. This is a nice pattern and I love the finished handbag. Lots of room to customize and modify.
Mods: I divided one of the internal pockets (by sewing down the middle of the pocket). I also added some mid-weight interfacing to the sides, body, and bottom of the purse.

I think this is an insanely cute purse. I'd like to especially point out that I managed to get over my "prints paralysis" with this project. Usually when I have fabrics with a print on them, I end up cutting something incorrectly and end up with two distinctly different sides. I'm really proud of actually managing to match these two sides up perfectly (and let me say, "perfect" is not a word that I would often use to describe my crafting, LOL). See? You can only tell it's the other side because the button is different!

The "In Town Bags" pattern is actually a "two-fer" - you get two distinctly different purse patterns for the price of one. I made the drawstring purse (so cute) last year and I use it as a knitting project bag. I was looking at the fabric trying to figure out a good use for it and it really struck me that the "smart purse" pattern would be perfect for this fabric.

I can only think of two downsides to this pattern. First, the pattern doesn't call for using any interfacing but I think you'd end up with an insanely floppy purse if you just used the fabrics. With interfacing, I love the shape of the purse. Second, the pockets seem to gap a bit when you put anything in them. I'm thinking about adding some little velcro dots to the pockets to make them a bit more secure.

I wasn't going to do this type of closure, as it seemed really non-secure, but I decided to give it a try (couldn't be easier to do, anyway) and then I decided that I loved it. It's just a loop of ribbon, sewn to the purse on one side (and covered with a decorative button) and then you loop it over a button on the opposite side of the purse. It's surprisingly secure and looks quite nice.

I still have a bunch of this fabric left. I was thinking it might make nice placemats, but I think I'll let it percolate a bit :)

*The tablecloth is basically just a hemmed square, made from lemon fabric that I've had in the closet for about a million years. I love that fabric in a really unreasonable way, but it's a bit too... intense?