Make a bag with old placemats

Hope everyone in the west had a great Thanksgiving weekend. I guess the weekend continues for you guys, mine is nearly over! And I present to you my Bangkok Bag tonight cos I will not have time tomorrow. Mournfully Monday! I call it the Bangkok bag because I bought the prints from Bangkok a while ago. I tried putting it on cushions and the usual but there was something amiss so I retired it for a few years. I also retired a few denim placemats because they were a bit old and we got something new and eminently more washable so here is how I put them together

And below is the DIY part. The prints, the denim placemats and bamboo bag handles. 

I first stitched on the patches, one on each side, by hand because I enjoy hand stitching in the balcony watching the sun playing hide and seek with the trees, listening to bird song... it's a cathartic experience. Anyway I broke a needle on my sewing machine when I finally stitched the place mats together and spent a good amount of time putting in a new needle after extricating it from where it had fallen into the bobbin below. Well to cut a long story short I sewed most of this one  by hand.

I trimmed the excess cloth from above to cut it into a squarish bag and used the excess to hold the handles. Since I had two patches this one is a double sided bag!

The picture above is just to show you I hand sewed it!

This is the other side. Do you like it? Do write in and tell me!