I use a leather needle to sew leather, vinyl, pleather, laminated cotton, oilcloth, foiled fabrics, and anything with a similar coating. A leather needle (in, as with all needles, the appropriate weight) is all you need to use to make sewing any leather-like material work without any unwanted sticking.
Because the problem is not the vinyl sticking to the machine bed or the presser foot or the needle, the problem is that the holes made by a standard needle are so small they don't allow the thread to move how it needs to. Leather machine needles (and glover's needles for hand sewing) have broad tips that cut tiny slits in the material, which makes enough room for the thread to move freely. I have been using leather needles for machine sewing leather-like materials with no problem for nearly 20 years and I have never needed to change anything else about my machine.
But.
I am still very bad at designing purses.
See, in an effort to remind myself how easily vinyl sews with the correct needle, I dug through my small pieces storage and came up with some vinyl remnants that have been in the stash for a least ten years each (and are still stable, instead of disintegrating like some early 2000s vinyls have) and then gathered other things that seemed to coordinate with them and ended up with this pile of stuff
which, over the course of a few days, I turned into...this
Don't worry, there are many close ups of the bad design decisions under the cut
First: I measured nothing. When I needed to mark a straight line for a cut? I used a transparent grid ruler to make a line perpendicular...ish...to the edges
most of which I did not actually cut for this project, instead relying on the hopes of straightness of the existing cut sides.
Like, that strip of silver vinyl above the front zipper? That was already cut for some other distant, forgotten project, so I was only assuming it was straight
With that in mind, you can now see why I may have had too much faith in the straightness of...everything
Yeah.
But the top stitching is really nice.
I applied the studs after sewing the side panels to the fronts. so I could place them right against the edges without worrying about calculating things or accidentally sewing over them.
And it was then that I realized that the last time I applied pronged studs was as a kid in the 1980s. So. Another aspect of this project that lacks experience.
I decided to use the jewelry pliers to curl the prongs back toward the front, instead of just folding them over
which...seems? more stable. The other option was to hit the prongs with some E6000, but I didn't want to wait for that to dry.
All of the vintage metal tooth zippers I used were longer than needed, so I trimmed them appropriately (and later used the off-cut from the gray zipper as trim, too)
When I sewed the zippers, I did pin them in place. Yes. Pinning vinyl.
Like this
at the verrrryyyy edge, well within the seam allowance, which is something else I've been doing when sewing vinyl for the last not-quite-20 years
Some spots ended up with too many layers to sew--again, not because there was any problem sewing the vinyl (yes, I am very repetitive about this) as much as because there were so many layers of vinyl that things wouldn't fit under the presser foot. And I wasn't even sewing vinyl at that point--I was trying to sew the lining sides to the front and back. The design decision that led to assembling in that order was basically "Oh. When I chose to use this approach for attaching the strap, I forgot that that meant the sides would need panels, instead of just sewing the front to the back. And now I scrounge for fabric to fill in the sides of the lining and enough vinyl to kinda sorta be enough for the shell sides."
So I had to hand sew the very tops of the lining on the sides
I am also not very experienced with hand sewing.
Still! I got everything assembled and turned right-side-out and slip stitched the lining opening (yes! a tiny bit more hand stitching!) and then it was time to install the two-part eyelets.
I have installed a lot of tiny eyelets in doll clothes over the years, but, can you guess how much experience I have with larger two-part eyelets? "Very little" is correct!
But I did, once upon a time, thrift a larger eyelet setter that at least was able to (mostly) punch the correct size holes in the strap tabs, so that helped. I had to pull out and re-do the first eyelet I tried setting and what I ended up with is really bad, but...y'know that point in a project when you just want it done? So, they're good enough.
I had nowhere near enough of the green or silver vinyls to make a strap, so I dug through the suitcase full of trims and found a slightly cottony grosgrain (it only barely has a smooth edge, but it does, so it's not petersham) that I slipped through the loops on these clips that I probably salvaged from something else, folded the raw edges in, and stitched twice.
....~¤*Top Stitching*¤~....
I didn't have quite enough of the simple crossed lines calico to line the entire purse
but of course I didn't figure that out until pretty far into construction, so I grabbed another red-based print from the small yardage storage and kept going.
Only the back half and top of the main compartment lining is made from the floral. And of course that inner pocket was unplanned, with its size determined by how much of the lines print I had left. The top edge is made from a strip of silver vinyl that,again, had been cut years ago for forgotten reasons.
The back of the purse is much more subdued than the front, even with the red lining peeking out...uh...like an open frog mouth. Huh.
But check out how well the vintage zipper back there--which, along with the other zippers and the fancy ribbon in this project, were part of the friend's relative's sewing stash sharing from summer 2019, thanks again so much--matches the vinyl that I bought long ago only because I thought it would make a fabulous ugly 1970s couch for dolls (which I can't remember if I ever made)
I can't tell if the cuts for the zipper back here were straight, either.
Soooo, yeah. I definitely need to work on my purse sewing, but, the vinyl sewing? No problem.
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