Upcycling a Belt To Fix a Purse

Happy May, of 2019!  This is my first post of this year partly because I was trying to figure out the best way to host my photos after Flickr changed their policy and party because I’ve been so mo fo busy this year.  Also, I’m old and time flies, so I kept thinking it was the beginning of the year, and it just now hit me that May means that it’s almost June, which is almost the half of the year, which is almost fall, which is almost Halloween.  Yay Halloween!  Now, here’s a post!

Last year, I bought a cheap purse for $7 at 1/2 of 1/2. I bought it for the size and the sturdy bottom (heh, heh) since my fabric purses wore out quickly on the bottom. By the end of the year, the handle, which was fake leather, had cracked and peeled so badly that it scratched my neck when I used it and I was afraid it might break at any moment. The rest of the purse was fine. My friend said I could see if a tailor could put a new strap on it, but I thought I’d try to fix it first. I found a belt at a thrift store that I thought would work and just needed to find time to work on it.

I brought all my supplies to the dinner table after everyone was done eating and went to town!

A closeup of the cracked purse strap

I used the seam ripper to remove the stitching around the belt loops so that I just had the fabric of the belt.

The general idea was to sew the belt around the existing strap. The trickiest part would be where the belt attached to the purse because there was stitching and hardware attached to the purse that I would need to sew around somehow. I basically fit the belt as close around the purse strap as possible and sewed the belt where I could. I had to use the thread as a tether in some areas just to pull the belt as close to the existing strap as possible so that it wouldn’t flap around on the parts of the strap where I did sew.

On the main part of the strap, I just did a basic stitch along the strap to wrap the belt around the strap. That was the easy, but time consuming part. My finger looks so weird here.

This side of the belt had loose threads from where I had to trim the belt to fit because it was a little longer than I needed. It also felt like I was sewing upside down because I was trying to sew to tuck in parts of the belt and thread in front of where the needle was rather than behind.

Finishing the sewing on the other end of the handle was both trickier and easier. 

All of this was still cheaper than paying a tailor to fix the purse. The belt was cheap and I already had all of the other supplies, so it didn’t cost much in that sense. The project only took two evenings to complete. After using the purse almost daily for four months, I’m pretty happy with this project!

The finished product!

Let me know if you’d like to see more crafty and DIY posts like this. Do you sew? Have you ever had to sew something weird like a purse or a shoe? Thanks for reading and make sure to check me out on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter as well!