DIY Floral Denim Crossbody Purse

I'm going to let you in on a little bit about how I work... what makes me tick. I'm out shopping and I spy the cutest floral crossbody bag. It's just 10 bucks but then I see one without the floral pattern for only 5 bucks. So of course I go cheapo and get the $5 bag and DIY it to my liking! So basically I'm cheap and crafty. That's me in a nutshell, really!

For this project you will need:
Tulip Soft Fabric Paints
Big, soft paintbrush
Small Tulip Fabric Paintbrush


First I'm going to show you how to make these flowers. They're nothing fancy and nobody is going to mistake them for Renoir but they're cute and easy.

First you need to get your paint set up. Here I have pink, red and white all together for my flowers and green and white for my leaves.


When you put the paint on your brush, you want it to be streaky. See above how it is both pink and white? That is what you want.


First make a U shape.


Add an arc or two to the top to make one connected shape.


Fill in the middle with your main color straight up.


And finish with a flourish of your darker color.


Now leaves! The leaf shape is pretty simple. Just paint your leaves on where they seem to fit the best.


Now you are going to grab that stiff fabric brush and start drawing your black lines.
Start from the center, kind of ringing in that area with curvy lines.


Draw a line or two around the outside edge. Then fill the area in between with a flourish or two to fill it out.


So here are my two flowers. They're not anywhere near the same but they're still pretty awesome and look good together.

Also, these aren't perfect and they aren't meant to be. You can draw outside the lines or further in than the edge of the color.


These suckers are pretty big and that's good for practice. But I really need to make smaller flowers to paint onto my purse. The size of the brushes you choose will greatly impact the size of flowers you can make. The brushes on the right were used to make smaller flowers...


...like the one you see here.


Now you know how to make the flowers it's time to get your item out to paint. Here is my $5 denim crossbody purse. Shazam.


You'll start painting your flowers JUST like we did in practice.


Fill out the area you want with them. Be sure to have one or two that hang off of the edge for a more realistic patterned look.

Make all of your flower bases first. Oh, and I added in some white highlights which you totally can too.


Next add your leaves. Try to fill in the area with your leaves. So pay attention that you're not placing one where it will have to overlap with another.

Paint a partial leaf or two coming off of the side of the piece. (bottom right corner as an example).



Finish up with your black lines to define the shapes of the flowers and leaves and allow to dry!

Paired with my favorite sweatshirt (because though the purse is spring ready the weather isn't) this casual cute purse is totally my bag!

These roses truly are super easy to create and the results look fabulous!

If you dig this you'll love my blog, Dream a Little Bigger