Posted by dravon in LiveJournal, Project Review | Comments Off on Shopping Bags
Shopping Bags
Another WIP completed! Woot! I’m starting to feel a wee smidge accomplished, watching that WIP pile be slowly whittled away.
This one is the shopping bag WIP, in which I made myself some sturdy bags to take with me shopping — or to store crafts-in-progress. I had a bunch of too-ugly-for-clothes material that was also a polyester and rather heavy. This means it did not make the ‘Keep This Material’ cut and was tossed into my scrap boxes. Michelle came over for a sewing day and I gave her the pick of my scrap material to make her very first sewing project – a bag. She choose this material and it was so nice as a bag it inspired me to make a whole BUNCH of them so that I could take them grocery shopping. I cut out material for 6 of them, and threw in the red chenille polyester material for a 7th bag.
Because I wanted the bottoms to be extra sturdy, for holding milk and the like, I switched out the material to this really heavy polyester brocade which was also in my scrap pile. I had enough of these to make 4 of the 6 loud bags with this foundation.
After cutting them out, step one was to serge all the seams together. Step two was to do a 1/2″ seam using the heavy duty double stitch on my machine. Then it was do a 1/4″ seam on the handles, turn and press. Then do a 1/2″ roll twice over for the top hem, insert the handles and hem it up. I’ve never tried doing the square with the X in it before so I decided that all the handles would have this treatment on them, to help really re-inforce them and make sure they remain exactly where they are no matter how much stuff I try to cram into the bags. The first few were downright hideous. For the last few bags, that square started looking pretty good. Here’s a close-up of the one of the nice ones, just because.
It took about 9 months to finish up this project, one bag at a time. Since the inside of the bag is not seen, I decided to use up all of my random thread color bobbins, and that did a bang-up job of clearing out my bobbin case for future use without wasting any thread. Bonus!
The bags are all really sturdy, and can easily hold 3 2-liter bottles plus cans and yet more stuff. It’s amazing how much fit into those bags!!! And now I look all stylin’ when I go to the grocery store. *lol*
