Summer Break

The short summer break (three weeks) between first year and second year has flown by and is rapidly coming to a close (we start orientation to clinical year next Monday, yikes!). I haven't actually had much time to craft/knit, being that I've been on various trips (mostly to beachy locales) most of the time. I tried to plan lots of trips so that the time would seem longer--days spent lounging at home fly by and blend into one another so much, despite being SO DELICIOUS. In what time at home I've had, I have been working on one big project pretty much exclusively, as well as coming up with a few new items for the Etsy shop, and finishing some sewing.
My newest venture was making a purse from one of those kits with heavy-duty double-sided fusible interfacing ("InnerFuse" in this case). I literally spent an entire day making this--mostly because I kept screwing up and needing to take apart my sewing machine, but also because I didn't know how to do half the things I needed to do to make it. Here it is in all its glory:

blurry detail of the inside:

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out considering it's the first sewn bag I've ever made, but I still don't know whether it's of a quality to actually carry out in public with me.
List of things I learned/fixed during the making of this purse:
-what satin stitch is. and that my machine would need a woman with more skills than I to make it look like it does in the kit's FO pictures.
-what tear-away stabilizer is. I'm not sure I needed it for the edges of this project, but I sure couldn't Google out a solution to doing satin stitches over edges without it.
-how to open up the top of the machine, and the bottom. and put them back together, too (important)
-how the bobbin winder works, and that it doesn't work as well with oil all over the wheel. (said oil being from the boy who seemingly emptied a gallon of the stuff inside the machine).
-how to remove a bent needle that's jammed into the bottom bobbin area (though not what to call that bottom bobbin area)
-how to get somewhat reasonable tension out of a totally f---ed tension know that's falling out of the machine half the time.
-to follow the instructions in order even if at first glance it seems clumsy (since I ended up having to sew a handle tab on by hand due to my reckless sewing on of the inside pocket earlier than instructed)
-that I'm never going to be able to sell handbags for fun and profit, because I just plain don't have the talent for sewing. thank goodness for those who do.