DIY Your Own Faux Fur Clutch

On a large piece of paper, ideally A3 (or sellotape a few bits of A4 together) lay your bag flat and trace around both the front and back with a pen. If you can, put markers where any shapes occur, for example on our bag there are two V shaped sections; this will give you a better idea of where to arrange our fabric cut outs later. This will give you a template of your bag.

Decide the type of pattern you would like the faux fur to have, we went with a camo style, you could simply draw some freestyle shapes, or follow a specific pattern like we did.

We Googled and printed an A4 image of a camo print, to look at as we drew our shapes, if art really isn’t your thing, you could trace the pattern completely.

We drew our pattern, taking inspiration from the camo print, try to plot out where you’d like your three colours to go, e.g. not having the same colour touching the neighbouring section. You can mark the shapes Blue, Light Grey and Dark Grey to help you remember.

Once we were happy with our pattern on both the front and back of the bag, we laid another piece of paper over our templates and traced these, so we had another copy of our plans.

We used the new traced piece to be our pattern guides for cutting out, we found it helped to have one original plan of the bag to look at, in case you forget where your shapes go once you’ve cut them out!

Cut out all your shapes for the front and back of the bag, and if possible position back into the shape of the bag, so you don’t lose your place.

Lay your first piece of cut out camo section over your piece of faux fur fabric and cut around it with fabric scissors. Cut a little bigger than the template, just to make sure there’s enough fabric to cover any joins, you can always overlap this with the next section when you glue it down.

If you are using your own pattern, follow the same instructions, cutting out and tracing your own shapes onto the fabric.

Once you’ve cut your section out, lay back on the bag’s template where it’s going to be glued.

Carefully glue each fur section down, pressing lightly.

Don’t worry if you can’t follow the pattern 100%, it’s just a guide. We tweaked our pattern as we went. And if you need to add in any little bits of faux fur to cover any gaps, that’s fine too!

When it comes to the side sections, it’s best to use bigger pieces of fabric, or even if yours are small, ensure they are glued around the sides, hold in place with your hands for a few seconds to make sure the pieces are firmly stuck.

To make the bag look extra neat, we finished off the inside edges with straight top fabric cut outs, so that when the bag is open it looks as great as from the outside!

Be careful not to place fabric over the magnetic fastening or zip - depending on which one your bag has.

When it came to gluing the back of the clutch, we overlapped our cut outs to go over or fit around any pieces that had been glued around from the front.

At this point we went back over our clutch, just checking all the faux fur was glued down and adding any extra glue where needed.

We then popped our clutch under a heavy book for half an hour just to ensure the fabric sticks firmly.