Making A Toad Bag🐸

 

This year my blog will be focusing more on my personal projects so you get to follow along with all the weird, fun stuff I make myself. This particular whimsical project has been on my list for a very long time but the pattern I wanted to use, an old Vogue one for a frog backpack, wasn’t available anywhere so I finally found the time to draft my own pattern. The only thing I had to help me was a rubber, prop toad that I use on my stand at markets, so that’s where my project started.

The pics below show the Vogue pattern frog bag and some vintage 1990s toad bags I love.

As it’s January I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this project so I dug into my crafting & scrap bin for this one. 

What I used:

• Scrap corduroy fabric for the bag shell (left over from some trousers), £0
• A spare short zipper I had, £0
• A piece of an old duvet for the lining, £0
• Wadding l had left over other projects, £0
• Embroidery threads from a charity shop that I already had, £0
• Scrap felt, used for the eyes, £0
• Bag handle, ordered online for the project, £6.99

Total spend: £6.99.

My Steps:

1. I made a rough pattern for the top of the toad using the rubber one as the base. I then hand sewed the pieces together and adjusted them as needed.  

2. Once I was happy with the look of the toad shape I sewed it all on my sewing machine.

3. I then made the pattern pieces for the base of the toad, sewed this together, cut the opening for the zip & stuffed the shell to see if it looked toad shaped.

4. I then hand stitched zip in place, made a lining on my machine from some left over scrap fabric & finished by hand stitching this onto the edge of the zip. This created a decent amount of space inside the toad to make the bag part.

5. Then I moved onto the trickiest bit, making the feet. This was fiddly as my fabric was corduroy and tends to fray a little bit. I didn’t want to make the fingers too big but I also had to to have a decent seam allowance in these pieces so this took a few goes.

6. Once the arms and little hands had been machine sewn & stuffed, I went over & hand stitched some of it just to give a cleaner finish.

7. The back legs were quite fiddly too. I was planning to make them as one piece but I ended up simplifying the pattern and making the thigh and foot separate pieces which was a lot easier to sew and actually looked better too.

8. I then stitched two pieces for the eyes out of the corduroy. I just added a little stuffing in them and I was going to buy plastic eyes but I tried creating the eyeball out of felt scraps and I loved it!

9. Finally, I got some embroidery thread and started making little knots to create a bit of knobbliness for the toad. This gave the base a little bit more interest and stopped it being just one block colour. 

Finally I made little fabric tabs for the handle and then hand stitched it all in place and it was done! The time spent on this project was 3 evenings, approx 9 hours which I don’t think is  bad for a super fun project that really challenged me.

If you like my more whimsical creations make sure you checkout my pieces for sale on the Sarah Sprout Collection page & my dedicated Instagram account is here. 

The Final Results: 

Meet Crocus 🐸