Multicolored Sweet Candy Handbag

A Sweet Candy handbag with a different picture on each side

Most printed bags show their pattern once and leave the back plain. Here the pattern carries on round the back. The front is built around a framed gallery, the back around a scatter of paw prints, and the two sit on the same tan and denim blue body. Whichever way you set the bag down on a table, there is something to look at.

The front panel: framed cats, keys and a clock face

The panel is square with rounded corners, printed on a faded blue ground. Frames of every size hang across it the way pictures hang on a sitting room wall: a black cat in a bow tie inside an ornate gilt frame near the top, a white cat in a smaller frame beside it, cameos, flowers, two old keys and a clock face lower down. A painted shelf holds pots and vases along the upper edge. Above the panel sits a gold metal plaque with the Sweet Candy signature, and a handwritten white line runs vertically down the brown band to the left.

The back: paw prints, a zipped pocket and a cut-out cat

On the reverse, dark blue paw prints wander across a pale blue ground. A zipped pocket runs horizontally near the top, framed in brown faux leather, with a long metal pull hanging from the slider. Down at the bottom right, a cat's head cut from the same blue-grey as the base rises out of the lower band, two silver rivets standing in for eyes. Beside it, white capitals read: Hang on to your dreams, there is only one me in this world.

Tan, chocolate and denim blue: how the panels are put together

The body is made of vertical faux leather panels that change colour as they go: tan at the outer edges, chocolate brown to one side of the print, denim blue to the other and again along the base. White topstitching stays visible on the handles and along every join, so the seams read as part of the design rather than something to hide. The base is narrower than the opening, which gives the bag its slightly flared shape.

Measurements, closure and the two ways of carrying it

Three things settle how a bag this size fits into a day: what it measures, how it shuts and how you carry it.

Wearing a printed bag without overdoing it

A bag with this much going on does its best work against plain clothes: indigo denim, a cream knit, a camel coat that picks up the tan panels. Let the print be the only pattern in the outfit and it reads as deliberate. If you would rather compare shapes first, the other hand-carried styles on this shelf range from structured boxes to soft buckets.

And if your hands are usually full, the styles built around a longer strap cover the same ground in a different format.