Camera bag

Like most bloggers, I love taking photos and so try to have my camera with me whenever I can. In the last couple of months this has resulted in various solutions of how to take a camera around whilst still having the essentials that I need for a day out, ranging from cutting down the essentials to the absolute bare minimum that I need and stuffing that in every spare bit of space in my camera bag to lugging around a massive bag with my camera bag and the rest of my contents of a normal handbag inside it. Sometimes these options are fine, but there's times when I just want a more simple solution that still looks good, so for a while now I've been coveting a Jo Totes camera bag. They look fantastic - just like a normal handbag but with padding for your camera and lots of convenient pockets for all the other bits and pieces you might want to have with you. Sadly they're a bit out of my price range for a bag at the moment, but one of them is definitely on the birthday/Christmas list (I just need to decide which one...) so my camera was going to stay in its current practical but not very pretty bag, but then I spotted this month's Sewing World magazine which caught my eye because it has a camera bag on it's cover. The solution! So I snapped it up and got to work.

There were quite a lot of pieces to cut out, interface and line with fusible fleecing so the preparation took quite a while but it was all fairly simple and easy to put the pieces together - helped by very clear instructions with photos of some of the slightly more complicated (still not very complicated!) steps which meant it was easy to know what you were meant to be doing. Here's my finished result...

And here's the back and inside - plenty of pockets:

The one change I did make was that I lengthened the strap - the one in the pattern seems to be for a shoulder bag but I prefer cross-body bags. I just measured the strap of a bag that I already own and used that for the length measurement, easy peasy!

Possibly the trickiest bit was attaching the press fasteners - it was the first time I'd used them and it took me a while to realise how useless the instructions that came with mine were. A quick google search sorted things out though!

In the middle of construction I was wishing that I'd chosen a print with a more random pattern for the outer pockets or that I'd deliberately constructed it so that the checked print intentionally didn't match up (or that I was the kind of person who didn't care if it matched), but I'm pleased that I persevered and made sure that it all lined up.

It was a great way to use up some of my stash too, and all of the materials I used were either left over from other projects or bargain remnant bin/ebay finds, and the stripey lining was the back of a men's shirt that I bought for £1 in a charity shop! 

If anyone else is having similar camera bag dilemmas, get out and buy Sewing World magazine now - this issue is still in the shops at the moment, and there are lots of other pretty projects in there too!