My First Bag

Let me first start off with the idea behind the bag. I came home Saturday, super pysched that I had completed my toss pillow cover at sewing class. We picked fabrics for our next project which will be a tote bag.

I learned the basics of using a sewing machine and what I didn't know or couldn't remember I had my handy sewing machine manual. I was so pumped from class that I wanted to make something else plus I wanted to see if I was able to do so without the instruction of a teacher. So I googled to find a bag I liked. I needed a weekend bag so I was looking for an easy one to make. I decided to make a duffle bag from this link.

Off I went to JoAnn Fabrics, it was my first visit and holy goodness it was amazing and overwhelming. It was like the Super Walmart of fabric and all things crafty. I literally spent two hours in the store. I think the first hour was really just spent browsing and touching all the fabrics.

When looking for things for my bag, I found a ribbon that I thought would look cool as strap. I bought cotton webbing instead of nylon (just preference, I liked the brown cotton better than the brown nylon). I figured I could sew these two together to get a nice strap. For the piping, I got home decor piping instead of Wright's piping for the simple fact that I didn't like any of the colors available. I got an outerwear nylon quilt fabric that was on clearance. I didn't realize it at the time, all the types of zippers so I opted for a brown and gold fashion zipper. I didn't find out til much later when the project was almost done that a purse zipper has that extra edge on BOTH ends of the zipper...o well. I got two different colored threads. A light brown to sew the ribbon to the nylon and a dark brown which I used for everything else. Hopefully due to the fact that I didn't exactly follow the "material instructions" my bag won't fall apart :-/.

My original plan was to make this bag but then I decided I wanted square sides (in doing so I figured I needed a larger rectangle so I cut 19.5 x 49, only to find out that to get square sides you do not need to cut out squares, just a larger piece of fabric and then when I sewed the strap on the fabric. I used these youtube tutorials to learn how to sew a zipper on correctly here and here. The ends of the strap looked like crap so I sewed the 12.5 x 12.5 squares (to replace the circles) I cut out together to get a larger piece and then sewed that onto the bottom of the bag with piping, I followed "tote bag instruction" pictures step 9 and 10 from here.

I sewed up the sides of the bag with piping and then followed these instructions to get square sides. I measured down 3.5 inches from the tip of the "triangle".

I spent two days working on the bag, I would say about 10 hours. During this time, my thread broke a million times, my bobbin ran out a dozen times, and my needle broke once. I also sewed the zipper on the wrong way and then had to seam rip it all out and do it again. I need to figure out the tension on the machine, I think that is where most of my issues are with my thread breaking and also get more familiar with heavy duty needles and threads.

The bag ended up looking like a zippered slouch hobo and its still big enough to be a weekend bag!