14th century French Pouch .1 – sneak peek progress .24 – sewing the pouch together .2 :)

In my last posting “14th century French Pouch .1 – sneak peek progress .23 – sewing the pouch together .1” you could see a good part of the progress pictures concerning the last finishing steps for my 14th century French pouch project.

And as I promised in my last posting, I am going to show you even more pictures today – the very last progress pictures I took of the finishing process.

Well, as you could see in my last posting, the 14th century French pouch was already nearly finished but there was still some work left I had to do. You know, a pouch needs drawstrings to be useful and this is how I attached them to the 14th century French pouch:

My first step was to measure the width of the pouch. Based on the pouch width and the number of eyelets I wanted to make, I determined the spacing of the eyelets. For this I simply divided the pouch width through the number of eyelets+1.

For example: If you want to make 4 eyelets, you have to make the following calculation:

4 eyelets -> pouch width divided trough 5

Why do you need to divide the width through 5 if you just have 4 eyelets? Well, you can see it right away if you count the eyelets and the spaces in between:
Border – space 1 – eyelet 1 – space 2 – eyelet 2 – space 3 – eyelet 3 – space 4 – eyelet 4 – space 5 – Border
As you can see at the simple example above, there is another spacing between the last eyelet and the border. If you just divide the width through 4, you would only be able to place 3 eyelets. 🙂

Then I marked the desired eyelet spacing with some pins along the top of the pouch. You can still see some of the pins along the top part of the pouch next to my hand on the picture above.

Normally I prefer to make hand-sewn and enforced eyelets for the drawstring part of a pouch. But when it comes to heavily embroidered pouches, like this one, I tend to use the medieval and very simple technique of just piercing through the fabric and the embroidery like you can see on the picture above.

Well, this simple eyelets might not be as strong as the hand-sewn ones which I made for the backside of the pouch – you can see them on the picture below – but they definitely have one great advantage: they don’t interrupt the overall appearance of the embroidery at the front side.

Though this simple eyelets might be medieval, I have to admit that I had to struggle quite a lot with my inner perfectionist before I decided to use this technique for the very first time.
I am still a great fan of hand-sewn and enforced eyelets but for embroidered pouches, where the embroidery reaches up to the top, this simple eyelets definitely look and work better.

Just a last note to this simple pierced eyelets – when you decide to do them, be very careful not to pierce through your embroidery threads. You need to make your eyelet opening in between your embroidery, through your fabric. Piercing through your embroidery threads would really weaken and in some cases even deform your embroidery by putting to much tension on the adjacent stitches.

And concerning the awl I am using for making my eyelets – I found my nice bone awl at a local flea market in vienna. But if you don’t have one, don’t worry, everything that has a similar shape, is very smooth and has a very pointy tip works quite as fine.

And for those of you who have never used an awl before another short hint: the awl helps to pierce through fabric rather than cutting or ripping it. Therefore it is very important that you don’t force your way through the fabric but instead carefully and slowly widen it by applying careful forward force and by twisting your awl slightly to the left and right. This way the future eyelet has still all the side support of the surrounding fabric and is very unlikely to rip.

At the picture underneath you can see how I carefully created another opening/eyelet for the pouch before reinforcing it with the buttonhole stitch:

And after finishing the last eyelet at the backside, I could finally move my drawstring through the last eyelets. As you can see at the very first picture of this posting, I already put the pouch drawstring through the top simple eyelets as I created them.

And here a picture of the top of the pouch with all drawstrings in place:

And a picture of the front:

Whenever you put the drawstrings into your eyelets, you have to take care that one end of your drawstring finally ends up on the left side and the other end on the right side.

And finally, here a look at the top of the pouch in closed condition: 

Adding the bottom and drawstring tassels was my next and very last step in order to finish the pouch. I didn’t take pictures of this last step due to time shortage but you can find a detailed description of how I normally add my tassels in my “fast and easy pouch project”:

• “4st step & posting: “Tassels! Tassels! Tassels!“”
• “4.1 Tassels: Pouch drawstring & how to attach a tassel to the drawstring“.

I hope you again enjoyed my progress pictures. And in the next posting I will show you how the finished 14th century French pouch finally looked like before I shipped it. 😀