Toiletry Bag
My first Scrapped Give away! I made it for the birthday of one of my best friends. Hope you like it A :)
This was the first time I mad a toiletry bag and I learned A LOT! It was a bit of improv and adjusting as I went along. The most important thing is to work with the fabric and reasses at every step before you move one.
This is the final pattern. I had to make some small modifications as I went along. You will need two panels of 15 x 20 cm (front and back) and 1 long strip of about 5 x 40 cm to go around the bottom of the bag (leave 5 cm extra for the finish) and 2 strips of 5 x 30 cm to put in the zipper. This is for both the outside fabric as well as the lining.
Ok, here comes the tricky part; the zipper. Start by cutting two strips of fabric. Make sure you have enough extra on the sides and at the ends. Usually I would take 0.5 - 1 cm on each side and each end. For the sides this turned out to be fine, but take 2 - 3 cm extra on each end just in case. We will cut off the excess later.
Now fold over the fabric and align it as close as possible with the zipper. A slight overlap is also ok. Hand stitch to keep it in place. The trick now is to get the lining in place on the other side of the zipper. Fold over the edge of the lning twice and pin and hand stitch it similar to the outside fabric (too much sweat on my forehead, so I forgot to take a picture of this, sorry!)
Initially I sewed the lining in the same way as the fabric (you can see this in the picture if you look carefully). Don't do this! I discovered half way that this will give you a really horrible finish on the inside of the bag and I had to redo it.
Machine sew both lining and fabric in one go as close as possible to the zipper. This is tricky, but if you don't do it with a single stitch, the finish will be ugly. I get the best results when I use the zipper foot of my sewing machine and leave the zipper open while sewing. Repeat on both sides of the zipper.
To put it together, attach the zipper panel to one end of the bag first. Instead of attaching it straight through (like in the picture), attach the lining to the lining and the fabric to the fabric right underneath the zipper. Then go around and attach the front and back panels. But! You have to work inside out, so turn the bag inside out and invert everything, so the seams end up on the inside (between the lining and fabric). Close everything except the the other end of the zipper. Use this opening to carefully turn everything right side out again and hand stitch it.
Post new comment