The finished patchwork bag

I've declared victory on this. It will most likely be used for small project storage: patterns, knitting stuff, that sort of thing.

Because of the buckram retrofit, the lining had to be put in by hand, not a fun thing to do, but it didn't take long. I tacked the corners together too, hiding the knots in the seams.

The lining fabric itself is a leftover piece of something from Dressew. It's much more suited to garments and looks rather sad in a bag; if I had been less cheap or lazy, I'd have either used a heavier satin or cotton, or interfaced it.

 
The bag is meant to have little tabs with grommets instead of these D-rings. But I wanted antique brass, and this was the only thing available that really matched the clips I could find. No great loss since they're easier to do a good job with anyway (although getting them in on top of the stiff ends of the zipper tape was a little tricky, as I recall).

Pieced bag from a German magazine

Here's an issue of (German) CUT magazine I got a couple of years ago...

... the main reason I bought it being this bag pattern.

I got started on it and was quickly reminded that I don't especially enjoy piecing. It's doable—not that I'm perfect at it—but fiddly, too much work for a result that's in most cases ultimately two-dimensional. This bag, at least, obviously isn't in overall structure, although the sides certainly are meant to be flat. (The fabrics were, I believe, discharge-patterned by my aunt-in-law.)

While I did back all the pieces with fusible fleece and then a woven interfacing, that clearly wasn't going to be enough. If I did this over, I think the ideal sort of backing for a lightweight cotton like this would have been fusible fleece backed in turn with the heaviest fusible available, with a generous amount of seam allowance cut away from the latter.

An issue with this style is that the zipper naturally wants to form a nice smooth curve, while the pointed shape of the sides wants to induce a sharper bend right at the center top of the bag. It would probably be a bit less obvious with a much stiffer fabric, which is almost certainly what the pattern intends, at least for the lining—since it's meant to be a toiletry bag, the pattern calls for a coated fabric to be used there, which would add a fair amount of structure.

Being as it may, I retrofitted the whole thing with two-ply crown buckram, which I'll post about next.