Ok, I put together my outer pieces and all, so here are some photos of my progress:
Sewing the front pieces together and topstitched. Pressing on a ton of interfacing....Ok....front pleat opened up . Then the scariest part of all...cutting away so much of the bag using the pleat template. Here is where a lot of us just stopped. I zoomed over to the Flickr group and found I was not the only one. Leah posted in and said all was well and to go for it.