Purse Repairs

So, I wrote about the cautionary tale of buying a Sonia Rykiel purse without inspecting carefully enough for condition issues. Originally, the greedy part of me hoped to resell it for a profit but that wasn’t going to happen with the missing handles and tear on the bottom of the bag. I darned the rip. Not invisibly, but sturdily. And no one’s going to look that closely at the base anyway). But I still had to figure out what to do with this sack.

inspiration came in the form of this ad that keeps popping up on my feeds. The dimensions of the Rykiel bag are roughly the same size (just squarer and a little bigger) than the bag pictured above. Why not replace the missing handles with a paracord cross body strap?

I went to Dollarama to buy some paracord but I found an even easier solution: a black bungee cord with carabiner ends that was the exact right length for a shoulder strap!

I still want to make a shorter, hand bag strap out of more colourful paracord. But I must learn the art of macrame first.

And since I was on a purse fixing roll, I decided to reline my Longchamps Pliage shopper that I got a yard sale many summers ago. This bag is classic for many reasons: it holds a lot, is water resistant, and it just looks so chic and Parisienne. But it does have issues. Mostly the corners wearing through. When I got it, the zipper was broken but I figured out how to get it back on track thanks to YouTube tutorials. And I used some bike patch kit stuff to cover the holes. And earlier this summer, I paid to have the leather straps reinforced. What I’m saying is that I have already invested a lot in this bag.

My earlier repair job started to bother me because the patches started to lift off. And the inside vinyl coating was starting to crack with age. To hide all of this unsightliness, I decided to make a new cloth lining. Not that it’s the most beautiful restoration work ever done (I was too impatient to buy matching thread so I used a highly visible white which shows off my unsteady stitching). It’s not perfect but I find it more pleasing to look at than patches. Most importantly, I hope to get many more years of use out of each of these bags.