I had a terrible time---I dropped stitches, lost the pattern (easy to do, since this stitch, unlike most others, changes direction every 4 beads) and ended up with a rectangle longer than it was wide and necked down in the middle, like an hourglass, into the bargain. Obviously, the original idea wasn't going to work, so I draped the piece over a wire armature, made the front diamond shaped (rather than an inverted triangle) to provide a front central flap, complimenting the two small back flaps, one on each side, draped over the ends of the wire 'hanger'.
I think even fringe is dull, so I concentrated it at points of interest---the bottom of the front triangle shape, the top folded over triangle, the corners of the back piece. Even worse, I hate the unimaginative straps most bag makers use. Chatt's has two big beads, each bracketed by nearly invisible czech 4 and 6 mm disks where the strap attaches to the purse, and that's it. From a bead-stringer's point of view, that's pretty boring. After spending so much time on my purse, I wanted a necklace worthy of it.
Having made several purses now, I have a little more sympathy
for the difficulties in creating a piece in which the purse,
made of many small beads, must combine with a necklace that has
many larger beads. Or, translated from the artspeak, my idea,
while interesting, doesn't quite work, though I did attempt to
create a transition with the seed bead additions on the
necklace, near the howlite (white and grey) donut on the right.
Having spent many many hours on the right angle weave, and then
many many hours on the stringing, I decided I had to spend many
many many more hours braiding a silk cord. This pattern, kongo
gumi (ultra or diamond hard braid) is particularly slow to make.
I used green and blue silk threads to make a diamond pattern on
a black ground.
And the bag? Well, I feel I got the right angle weave more or
less down---I think there's only two mistakes in this one. It's
much easier to learn if one's not trying to follow a
pattern at the same time, and following patterns, especially for
color, isn't my idea of fun anyway. Alas, the striped beads
that started the whole project were somewhat larger and not
manufactured with same evenness as the size 13s used in the blue
fringe of the "variation" bag. That and the visual uneveness
caused by the stripes made for much less sucessful fringe than
on the previous piece. The strap is plain not for the
philosophical reasons mentioned above, but because by this time
I was sick of the whole project.
Despite the many problems I had with the first project, I felt it was more interesting.