“Grow Your Blog” with a Tutorial

Hey Y’all!!  Welcome to this special edition of my blog this week.  I’m here as a part of Vicki’s “Grow Your Blog” blog hop over there @ http://vicki-2bagsfull.blogspot.com.  There are almost 600 blogs taken part in this special party. From what I understand there is a wide variety of blogs taking part in this 2nd annual meet & greet.  How COOL is that?!!!  That is a lot of people to visit.  It may take me a month to visit them all, but what fun it will be.

In fact I was so excited that I decided to do something new just for this event. I’m going to do my very 1st tutorial!!!  Oh wow… now that I announced --- my nerves are a bit fluttery now.  Well here goes nothing-something-I don’t know yet.  LOL

I’m doing a “Gift-A-Month” challenge with a close friend as a way to stave off the “end of the year manic/panic swap sewing” and this month we decided on Wine/Gift bags. The goal was to get at least 3 bags done. We choose Christmas, Party & Spring as our themes.  Since I had to pack 99% of my quilty some up due to Holiday visitors, and ship it off to storage;  I pulled bits & pieces from here & yonder.  And here is what I found in about 5 minutes of looking. 

 Some Fat Quarters, some larger pieces of scrap fabric, a package of red, green & gold rickrack and an assortment of hand made and pre-made bindings from other projects.  I didn’t really hunt for long as I was more motivated in getting started then digging. I had looked at “bag” patterns per say and decided to “wing it” as the fabric was a big factor in how big the bag would be.  I do that sometimes… I think of it as a bit of mindless designing.  And while I was starting the Paisley bag,  I thought I could turn this into an improv tutorial.  So here we go.

With this bag I used two pieces of some fabric samples that I had in this pretty neutral paisley print.  I started by folding the two top edges down twice about 1/4”.  Then I ran 2 stitch lines across each of them separately.

         

    

Before I stitched the two sides together,  I had cut two 6  1/2” pieces of lacey ribbon for the ties.  I eye-balled about 4” from the top of the newly sewn edge.  I pinned a piece of the edge of the sides, making sure that the ties are in between the right sides of the fabrics.  A hint: I pinned the loose ends to the center of one side to make sure they didn’t accidentally sewn into the seams.  Like so:

Now match up the two side with the “right” side of the prints facing each other.  Pin the edges for both sides and the bottom and head for the sewing machine.  Now I like to start the seam and backstitched the folded-over edges and where the ties are then head on like normal.  I found that this little trick can give those points extra strength to hold up to a lot of handling.  I also run double seams on all my stitching seams again for the same reason.  This one I was able to run my two stitches as one long run.

           

 

At this point, you just turn it the right way out and run an iron around the piece to make it pretty.  And this is what this ended up looking like.  This little bag made from fabric samples and measured finished 6  1/4” X 15  1/4”  with it’s 6  1/2” ties on each side. 

It was prefect for sticking a bottle of wine  with room to take those slightly bigger bottles of Champaign. Along this one I made two more bags.  The Elf bag measured out @ 10  1/2” X  16  1/2”  and is holding a 1000 piece puzzle in it.  The Party Time bag is great for any party theme.  Birthday, New Year’s or even Weddings.  This one is a tad bigger as it measures 10” X  19”.   It was holding my son’s baseball glove, a softball, 3 DVD’s , and a large bag of Starburst candies. 

The Elf bag has a seam running down one side and the bottom, as I folded the fabric in half.  The Party Time bag I did a bit different, I gave this one a back seam.  I ran the seam like the others and shifted the seam so that it was in the middle of the back.  Before I sewn the bottom, I ironed opened the seam that was going on the back.  For their ties, I used the red, green and gold rickrack on the Elf bag and on the Balloon one I used a piece of purple binding that I made for another project.  I simply ran a stitch line down the open side before attaching it seams at the time of sewing.

The kicker is none of these took more than a Fat Quarter to make!!  You could make several sizes out of a yard of fabric. They are quick, easy, fun, and you can make them to customable to the person,

     

      

The nicest thing about these is you can put several themes and sizes in a Ziploc bag and stash them in the glove box  of your vehicle for a fast gift wrapping on that last minute gift that you stop and buy on the way to that event with a card …viola…done.

Now - I’m so caught up in the making of these cute little bags that I am going to give away 2 random print bags to some lucky person who leave me a comment. You don’t have to be a follower but you must leave me a way to contact you if you win. If you don’t have a blog – please leave an e-mail address in your reply.  I will let Mr. Random # Generator select a number on the Saturday , Feb 15th.  This will give everyone a chance to come by  & visit for a couple of weeks.

Thank You for stopping by this special edition of my blog.  Please be sure to check out the rest of the blogs taking part in this special blog party.  Just click on the link “Grow Your Blog” and off you go…. finding new friends, learning new crafts and may be you might be a lucky winner somewhere along the way. I’m list in #18 in the 50-100 followers section.

Toodles,
Tricia