Carpetbags

I don't know about you, but I'm one of those people who (besides thriving on having 100 projects to do all. the. time), when I finally actually start a project, I can work nonstop until it is done.  Unless, of course, I hit a brick wall.  Then in a fit of tears, I throw it in a dark corner of my closet where it sits abandoned in the Land of the Forgotten.  Then, several years later at 3 a.m., I will sit up in bed with an epiphany of how to fix the problem.  Such is the story of my carpetbags.

About two years ago, I decided I was going to try to make some carpetbags so that I would have something authentic to carry around all my little lovelys at reenactments.  I dove into research.  Carefully, I made lists of all the items I would need.  You can find everything you need for a carpetbag online.  The only tricky one is the frame-the largest one available is 18".  That's fine if you want a slightly smaller bag, but I wanted all the space I could get with these bags (When going to living history events, I'm not known as a 'light packer') so that wouldn't do.  After much research with no luck, I showed a picture of a frame to my dad who can put together pretty much anything and told him 'I need something like this but 21" long and 7" wide when open".  Next day, I had two lovely metal frames.  Gotta love Dad!  I have no earthly idea how he did it but it looks like he took pieces of flat 1/4" metal and bent them into shape.  Then drilled holes into the ends and inserted a little connector of sorts.  Here are some pictures:

So, I had a frame.  I bought locking supplies online, I bought a keyhole cover, the inner key mechanism thing and a skeleton key.  I didn't buy the little hook thing that the key mechanism hooks into to lock the carpetbag, but I found something similar to the piece at Home Depot and used that instead.

            Little Hook Thing                           Keyhole Cover                       Inner Key Mechanism                                    

Anyway, since I wasn't sure how this would work, I bought some carpety looking fabrics from Hobby Lobby instead of going pure wool carpeting.  I bought a blue/green and a red/black fabric.  Then I cut my pieces.  I cut 2 22" by 18" pieces and 2 8" by 18" pieces.  The smaller pieces, I cut the tops to look like a v to accommodate the frame's curve.  The point in the middle was 16" from the bottom.

I sewed these pieces at a 1/2" seam allowance to form a rectangle.  Then I folded the top edge over 1" and 1" again, put in the frame, and whip stitched around the edge.  I then cut a 7" by 21" out of balsa wood (found at Hobby Lobby) and an 8" by 22" piece of brown leather.  I drilled five holes int the wood (one on each corner and one in the middle) and poked the same holes into the leather for my little purse feet (found at Hancock Fabrics).  They only come in packages of four, but all the originals I found had five, so I bought two packages.  I put the purse feet through both layers thereby attaching the leather and wood.  After that, I put the outer fabric inside out and upside down.  I poked tiny holes all around the edges of the leather and sewed the leather and outer fabric together using waxed thread.

Then I flipped the whole thing to where it was right side out.  I took the extra leather and cut handles (I cut 2 pieces 2" x 16" for each carpetbag).  I put a thick cording in the middle and sewed the handles together and then to the outer fabric of the carpetbag.  I then cut lining the same size as the outer fabric (plus a 8" by 22" piece for the bottom) and sewed it in.  I used extra muslin, but a lot of originals had white silk interiors.

I then sewed the key mechanism and the hook thing into the interior of the carpetbag.  After that, I sewed the keyhole cover in using gold thread and a little superglue.  Not period correct at all, but I couldn't figure out another way to do it.

Voila!  Functional (although not exactly period correct) carpetbags.