KeroKeroPi Purse

This is the purse I finished off few days ago. It is supposed to be my friend's birthday gift but I ended up not being able to complete it in time. By the time she receives it, it will be a "belated bithday gift". Well, never too late to show the love to your friends, better be late than nothing..... Hope she don't mind :p Frankly speaking, I don't have many friends from so long ago. This friendship with this birthday girl is 15 years old. I especially cherish this friendship now because we are so far apart. She is residing in Hong Kong and I am in Malaysia. By the way, we met in UK during our studies and on first sight, I knew that she is a kind hearted girl, so adorable and helpful.We have so many pleasant memories to share though we only lived together for a year, yeah living in the same hostel, don't get me wrong. She was extremely crazy about Kerokeropi, so much so that she had a collection of them. I gave her a KeroKeoPi T-shirt many years ago as her birthday gift, now, KeroKeropi purse and it is my handmade piece especially for her.I hope she will like it!!!!

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Monkey Frame Clutch Purse - Tutorial

In my previous post, I showed you how to felt the monkey called Chi-Chai Monchan. This time, this tutorial is going to show you how to make the Monkey Frame Clutch purse that I made for my friend as a thank you gift. You don't need a sewing machine to do it, just your hand, a needle and thread!!!
Material:
1. Exterior fabric for A pattern, 2 pcs.
2. Exterior fabric for B pattern, 2 pcs.
3. Inter-lining fabric for A & B pattern, 2 pcs.each
4. Poly-sponge for A & B pattern, 2 pcs each
5. Iron-on interfacing for A & B pattern, 2 pcs. each
6. 8.5cm wide frame clutch (口金), 1 pc.
Finished product Dimension: Approx. 10.5cm W x 9.5cm H x 6.5cm D
Cut out the fabrics as per pattern shown above.
Iron on the interfacing by sandwiching the poly-sponge in between for pattern A & B respectively.Sew on Chi-Chai Monchan felt onto the right side of exterior fabric A (click here for the tutorial of making the Chi-Chai Monchan Felting). Embroider "Chi-Chai Monchan ♥ Bananas" onto another piece of fabric A.Tack stitching pink colour thread onto fabric B with about 2mm spacing for each stitch and 10mm width apart for each line. Prepare the slip pocket. I sew on my label onto it :)
Sew the slip pocket onto the inter-lining as shown.
Join fabric A & B by back-stitch A-B-A-B as shown, then complete it by stitching it to A again. Be careful on the bottom tip, just sew until the tip end, please don't go beyond that point.
This is the picture of how the bottom is supposed to look like before completing the joining. Clip curve near to the sticthing line (please don't cut the stitches) at the space of 1 cm as shown. This is neccessary to have a nice curvature at the corner of the purse. The wrong side should look like picture shown below.Flip it over and it should look like this.Repeat the above steps to the inter-lining. Iron the joint seams.
Again, the bottom of the 4-piece-joint should look like this.
Now, we have finished both interior and exterior pieces.
Turn the inter-lining (2) to the wrong side.
Insert (1) into (2). Sew the upper portion by back-stitch.
Reserve half of the border unstitched. We are going to use this unstitched portion to gain access to turn the purse inside-out.
Pull out the exterior face from the unstitch gap.
Smooth out the inter-lining into the purse.Stitch up the unstitch portion to close the gap.

Tack-stitch the peripheral and get ready for the sewing the frame onto it.

Mark the centre line by water-erasable pen.

Stitch the frame with back-stitch, begin from the centre line. I used 4 strands of nylon thread to reduce the chances of thread breakage.

Complete!!!!

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Monkey Frame Clutch Purse

Finally, I made it.... specially for my friend Sumay. I purposely delayed this posting as I wanted to surprise her by not letting her see how the purse actually looked like. I even asked her not to peek my blog on the felting part too until she receive the parcel. I sent it out yesterday and she received today :)) Her reaction was "I am not going to use it as it is too precious, I will keep it as a souvenir. I am going to be devastated if I lost it or dirted it". Oh, how sweet she is...

This one took me little while to finish as I spent time to photograph each and every step I did. It is going to be shown on my step-by-step tutorial for frame clutch purses and is going to take some time to edit and rearrange. I will post it up as soon as I finish editing it, please be patient :)

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Tutorial - Felting on "Chi Chai Monchan"

This is the monkey, Chi Chai Monchan that I planned to made as part of the frame clutch purse to my friend, Sumay.
I would like to show you the process to make one, hope you will try it out too.

Colour selection of the felt material.
Making cardboard stamplates for each part of the body.
Cut out the required shapes and sizes as shown below according to the felt colour you chose. Sew the cheek to the face. Mark the eyes and mouth with water based erasable pen (the ink will disappear with contact in water). Then sew the face to the body.

Fill in the polyfill to add more dimension to the face.
Complete sewing the face.

This is how it looks after completing the face. Embroider the eyes with black thread and the mouth with pink. Again, embroider it after stuffing with polyfill will add some depth for the features.

Now, you can sew the body to the fabric surface you want to complete the felt project.

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Special Thanks

Friendship is such a weird things. It connects 2 people from two different worlds. Friendship are there to share, help, support, accompany, and most importantly there must be trust in between. 3 years ago, I found her, my dear friend, Sumay, through a web supporting group. She is 350km away from where I stay, yes, I am in Northern Peninsular Malaysia and she is in the Central. Our long distance friendship grows thru emailing, the topmost record that we hit was at least 1 email everyday, non-stop for weeks!!!! If If writing emails to each other is like the old fashioned pen-pal, then we should be re-classifed as e-pal. We talked about almost everything, covering from daily topic to medical, laws, sports even to politics. I love exchanging ideas and thoughts with her, she would always surprise me with her vast knowledges in all aspects. We seldom see each other since we are so far apart. Sometimes when I think about it, I cannot believe that we are still writing to each other even though our projects are complete. I will cherish this friendship for as long as I can and hope we will continue to do so until the day we are old enough to loose all our teeth.
To show my appreciation to her who is also helping edit my blog and getting more and more successful by the day, I decided to make her a frame clutch purse. I told her my intention and ask her for ideas and opinions.... She likes monkey so much, without any delay she gave me a link to a picture of a Monkey, Chi Chai Moncha. Hope that it is gonna be a nice and cute little purse for my dear friend, Sumay.
"Chi Chai Monchan is a fun-loving little boy monkey with a whirly-curly tail, he lives on a small tropical island in the South Seas with his parents where he spends his days climbing trees, playing hide n'seek in the jungle and sailing in his banana boat. His favourite food is bananas."

Note from Sumay: Thank you so much Joanne! Yes it was so strange that we met up on a support group and from then on, struck a friendship which included meeting up a few times. Joanne has been such a good friend, giving me support in other aspects (he he Joanne you know!) and found her to be such a warm, beautiful, smart (a qualified engineer!!!!!) and from this blog, obviously a very talented and artistic lady (how does she find time, with a baby and pre-school child?????). I am more than happy to help her out with her blog and so surprised and touched that she is making me a special bag, all for me and the only one in the world! Thank you, Joanne!!!!!

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