Bag a Week: Double Trouble

One of the goals in my bag-a-week campaign is to design the right bag for myself. Actually this has always been true for any time I've made a bag, especially since my purse needs change so frequently. In the past few years, I've really gotten into Vera Bradley purses, which you can't fail to miss if you've seen me around, since their patterns can be quite, uh, vibrant. What I especially love about their bags are all the little pockets inside. Naturally this means that my bags need to have a million pockets.

These two bags are actually two weeks' worth of sewing, but I'm posting them together, since the second was an iteration on the first (rapid textile prototyping is an employable skill in the tech industry, right?), and they're similar in both style and material.

Bag 1: Front flap, single back handle, pockets inside, back zipper (phone sized!).
Materials: quilting cotton (print), plain weave cotton, upcycled zipper (from a top with an irritating, unnecessary zipper that I liberated).

Bag 2: Same base shape, tapered front flap, two handles, back zipper, no inside pockets.
I was trying another version to see if the top curve worked better if I constructed it differently (it doesn't, really), and didn't want to spend extra time on the pockets, which I already knew worked well. This one also has some interfacing.
Materials: quilting cotton, plain weave cotton, zipper, Pellon 40 midweight stabilizer.

The stabilizer made a huge difference in the end result. The other bag was pretty droopy, but this one holds its shape nicely, and I'll definitely be using it for my next bag pattern.