Bag of the Week 42

Wash and Wear

Today’s post is actually last week’s bag.  I wrote about this project here, about the frustrations I was having.  Sigh.  I was so enjoying making this bag until I hit a snag.  It is now finished but so are some of the grand plans I had for this bag, too.

I fell in love with this little travel lingerie bag the first time I saw it in Stitch magazine (Spring 2010).  It is designed as a flat pouch with zippers at either end, divided in the middle to form two separate areas, one for clean items and one for dirty.  I used the template provided on the Stitch website and followed the author’s instructions for appliquéing the garments onto the light aqua linen I picked for the body of the bag.  The fabrics and laces are fused onto the bag before they are stitched down.  The instructions call for hand stitching with a running stitch but I used a small zigzag (1.5 mm x 1.5 mm) and monofilament thread.  The clothesline is pearl cotton couched on with more of the monofilament.  I chose to machine embroider the words instead of hand stitching them.  I found a great floss-stitched font at Jolson’s Designs (for a mere $3 – quite a bargain).  I even stitched a little monogram on the purple shirt.

I really enjoyed the project to this point.  When it came time to put the bag together I ran into trouble.  There is nothing wrong with the written instructions; I just couldn’t make my chosen supplies come together.  First, the linen I was using is fairly bulky.  I tried an old trick of using a longer zipper than necessary, planning to cut off the extra.  The bulk of the zipper coil added to the linen made it impossible to get a cleanly turned corner.  I also realized I was going to have trouble hand sewing in the lining and making it fit correctly with the awkwardly turned corner.  I unstitched the entire thing and started over.

After much trial and error what finally worked for me was to sew the lining pieces together into a tube and the outer fabric into another.  I placed the lining inside the outer sleeve, serged the raw edges together and treated it as one.  I sewed in about 1.5” on each end of the top opening and set a smaller zipper into the remaining opening.  The zipper is stretched out flat and is merely topstitched into place.  The zipper tape hides the serged fabric edges.

I thought perhaps I could sell bags like this in my (coming soon) Etsy store.  I imagined they might make great gifts for bridal attendants.  But I will have to come up with a much more streamlined design for the bag if that is going to work, as the amount of time I spent just constructing this bag makes it impractical as a commercial item.  This was a good lesson that dreams need to be tested out in reality to make sure they will work.

I'm sharing this post today with the folks over at Today's Creative Blog on their Get Your Craft On feature.  Check them out.