Two of the fundamental construction ideas for this pouch came from So Sew Easy: the accordion-fold corner boxing method, and side tapering. I’m somewhat amazed that, in my decades of sewing, I only first encountered the accordion-fold method a year and a half ago.

I’m going to give the directions for the exact bag I made most recently, then some tweaks and variations for it, and finally the calculations you’ll need if you want to make your own custom size.

There are photos below from both of the two most recent bags I’ve made. I tried to pick the ones with the clearest demonstrations.

Sewing instructions

You’ll need lightweight upholstery fabric or something like canvas or duck, and a zipper that is at least 11″ long. Make sure the fabric is something your machine can sew through four layers of. This is a great remnant project.

1. Fabric preparation

Cut 2 pieces of fabric, each 11 1/4″ by 13″. The 11 1/4″ edges will be at the opening of the bag. Zigzag the edges of the fabrics.

Fold each piece of fabric in half, wrong sides together, to make 11 1/4″ by 6 1/2″ rectangles. Pin near the fold, with your pins parallel to it.

Now fold the loose sides of the fabric back up, resulting in a piece that is mostly right sides together but with a little accordion fold at the bottom. The original fold and the new ones should be 5/8″ apart, and the edges of the fabric should all line up together. Pin all along the edge; press the fold if desired (not shown). If this description and the photos are not clear, refer to Sew So Easy’s video.

2. Sewing individual pouches

Mark your sewing lines: you will be sewing straight up from the bottom for 5/8″, with a 1/2″ seam allowance, and then diagonally to a point 1/2″ down from the open edge and 1 1/8″ in from the side. The top 1/2″ will be open. Sew all four seams (either direction; I don’t mean to imply they have to come up from the base).

Why not sew a diagonal line all the way from top to bottom? The opening at the top is needed for zipper installation, and sewing diagonally through the accordion fold will cause the gusset triangle to pucker in the finished bag. (I tried it! Passing the savings on to you.)

Trim the seam allowance on each side and zigzag the new raw edge. Press seam allowances open near top; finger-pressing will do.

3. Connecting pouches

You now have two individual pouches. Turn each one right-side-out and choose which side will show, and which will be hidden against the other pouch. Hem the hidden sides: fold the raw edge down 1/2″ to the wrong side, with side seam allowances open so they are enclosed in the hem, and sew to secure.

Turn one bag inside-out again and nest them, right sides together. I find it easiest to slide one bag into the other if I pleat it in the middle to make it narrower, then spread it back out again once it’s mostly inside. Pin the hemmed edges together and mark the sewing lines for the pocket: the vertical seams are 4″ long and 2″ in from the side seams at the edge; then connected at the bottom with a horizontal seam. Sew.

Pull the inner bag out and turn the whole thing right-side-out. You should have 2 pouches connected in the middle via sewing that creates a flat pocket, with a raw (well, zigzagged) edge on each outer side.

4. Zipper installation

Line up the zipper so the top zipper stops are 1″ outside the side of the bag; any excess zipper length should be at the bottom end. Pin the zipper to one bag opening, wrong sides together, with the edge of the fabric lined up to the edge of the zipper tape. Keep the side seam allowances open so they get tacked down. Sew down the center of the tape. I typically use a standard sewing machine foot bumped up against the zipper teeth, with the needle moved toward the zipper teeth.

With the zipper closed, line up the other fabric edge and pin the zipper at one end (either one). Open the zipper and pin the rest, sewing the way you did the first side. If you zip the zipper at this point it forms a sort of trough between the sides of the bag, when the edges of the fabric point upward.

Trim the fabric edges as needed so they won’t protrude past the zipper tape, and fold the zipper to the outside of the bag. Make the fold in the fabric tight. Sew near the edge of the zipper tape to secure.

5. Finishing

Shorten the bottom end of the zipper if needed: sew across it a couple of times, a little more than an inch away from the bag side seam, and trim the extra length past your stitching (shown in previous picture).

Cover the raw end with a fabric tab: begin with a piece of fabric that was 1.5″ by 3″. Fold the long edges in by 1/4″ and then the short edges in by 1/2″, and fold the whole thing in half to make a 1″ square. Sandwich the end of the zipper inside so that your zipper-shortening stitching is hidden, and topstitch as close to the edge as possible on the non-fold sides.

(I make tabs slightly differently each time, and the one on the orange zipper is probably the tidiest one I’ve ever made! A wider tab on the green zipper shown for comparison – that kind is easier to put on the open end of a zipper.)

To fully match my bag, you’ll need a decorative bead zipper pull. I used three beads threaded on a head pin, with a lobster clasp attached via a wire-wrapped loop (not a good one, I didn’t leave an actual stem to wrap around). I added the clasp to the loop after shaping it and before wrapping the wire. Not my area of instructional expertise, so here are written instructions from Goody Beads and a video tutorial from Beadaholique.

Quick tweaks for your bag

1. If you need to piece your fabric, cut 4 pieces of fabric each 11 1/4″ by 7″, and zigzag all four. Sew pairs together along long edges at 1/2″ so you end up with two 11 1/4″ by 13″ pieces with a seam down the center. Press the seam allowances open. Note that you’ll be sewing through SIX layers of fabric at the accordion fold in this case.
   
2. In step 4, you could line up the zipper tape so it extends 1/8″ out from the edge of the fabric, and then not need to trim your fabric.
   
3. Often I also add a tab to the open zipper end in step 5. It increases the symmetry and gives you something easier to hold on to when opening the pouch. This is done in the same way, although working with the open zipper end is a bit fussier. I was ready to be done at that point, though, so I didn’t add one to this bag (but I did save a bit of fabric in the inner pocket in case I change my mind later). If you don’t need to shorten your zipper you can also skip fabric tabs entirely, which is seen in two of the five bags at the head of the post.

Variations

• Zipper tape to inside of bag: If you would rather have the zipper tape to the inside of the fabric, keep the two bags nested after step 3. The right sides of the unfinished edges of the bags will be facing each other. Line up and pin the zipper similarly to step 4, except right side of zipper to right side of fabric. Sew down the center of the zipper tape on both sides, then turn the whole bag right-side-out and topstitch through the fabric and zipper tape to secure. For tape-to-inside zippers I prefer to topstitch very close to the fabric fold instead of near the edge of the zipper tape (I bump the regular sewing machine foot against the zipper teeth with the needle centered), but it is a matter of taste.

• Single pocket pouch: It you only want one pocket, cut only one piece of fabric, and skip step 3 entirely. Install the zipper with the bag right-side-out to have the zipper tape show, and with the bag inside-out to have the tape (somewhat) hidden. If you have directional fabric you may want to piece, as in the first tweak above, regardless of how much fabric you have to work with.

• Lined pouch: I have not made a properly lined bag, just one where two layers of fabric were treated as one. If I were to try it, I would start exactly the same way but with 4 pieces of fabric instead of 2, and without zigzagging anything. After constructing the individual pouches I would connect lining to outer fabric of each pouch in place of hemming the hidden side of each pouch in step 3: put lining inside outer (or vice-versa), right sides together, and sew along that edge at 1/2″, with the side seam allowances open so they’re caught in the sewing. Turn the whole thing right-side-out so the lining is nested inside the outer fabric, wrong sides together. Get your seam allowances and so forth tidied up, press, and topstitch close to the seam. Then use the zipper installation to connect the lining and outer fabrics at the other half of the open edge, treating them as a single piece of fabric. Basting or zigzagging them together along the raw edge before installing the zipper might make it easier.

Sizing your own bag

If you know what finished measurements you want for width, height, and base breadth, you can calculate the fabric size needed and where to place the seams. Once you’ve constructed the individual pouches the only thing that will change in the rest of the instructions is the measurements for sewing the pocket that connects them. The important consideration there is to have something that connects them through at least half of their width and height. If you make very small pouches you might not be able to have a pocket, but you should still make two seam lines down from the open end, about a quarter of the way in from each side seam.

Choosing your size

When deciding bag size, note that the sides of these bags are theoretically tall, narrow triangles – but in practice, the contents will settle and the long triangle edges will bulge outward, converting some width into breadth.

The combination of that with the intentional flattening of the bag as you go up from the base means you need a generous amount of ease, and the fuller you want to pack the bag, the more ease you need. The marker pouch I describe above has finished measurements of 9″ width and 1 1/4″ breadth. I made it for Tombow brush pens, which are 7 1/2″ long. I’d previously made them a bag with 8 1/2″ width and 1″ breadth, and once the bags were over half full the pens were quite tight in there. The extra base breadth means they won’t reach half-full as quickly, and the extra width means when they get there it won’t be as snug.

I prefer a zipper that sticks out from the bag by an inch on each end, which requires a zipper at least 2″ longer than the finished width of the bag. This helps with the bag opening fully and also makes it easier to sew the zipper to the bag.

Fabric and seam measurements

The whole computation is based on this fact: the breadth of the base will reduce not only the height of the bag, but its width. If you want a 6″ wide bag with a 1″ base, you need 7″ of width to start out with, plus seam allowances. For a 5″ high bag with a 1″ base, you’ll need 11″ of fabric to start, plus seam allowances.

I recommend a half inch seam allowance at the opening, because that works well with the zipper installation and getting the enclosed edges away from the zipper teeth by enough but not too much. You could use a smaller seam allowance on the side edges but that would be asking for absent-minded mistakes in my case, so I use 1/2″ everywhere. To keep things a little simpler below, I’ll assume that seam allowance instead of leaving it as a variable.

In sum, your fabric cutting measurements are:
width: finished width + base breadth + 1″
height: (2 * finished height) + base breadth + 1″

To fold the fabric and mark your seam lines, the important measurement becomes tuck depth, 1/2 of the base breadth. The term “tuck” refers to the accordion fold you make in step 1. After folding your fabric in half wrong sides together, you’ll fold each half back so that the original fold and the two new folds are one tuck depth apart.

Your seam will start 1/2″ down from the opening edge and (1/2″ + tuck depth) in from the side edge. It will angle outward until it is a tuck depth up from the bottom edge and 1/2″ in from the side edge, and then go straight down to the bottom.

If you work in metric would could probably round the half inch seam allowance down to a centimeter, but you might want to turn down a bit more than a centimeter on the enclosed edges (hence start your side seam more than a centimeter down from the opening edge).

Bag sizing examples

The dark bag with gold accents was the original Tombow bag, the one that turned out to be too snug. It is 5 1/4″ tall (per the enclosed edges – more like 5 1/2″ total because the zipper doesn’t carve off a full 1/2″ seam allowance) and 8 1/2″ wide, with a 1″ base. So my fabric measurements were:
width = 8 1/2″ + 1″ + 1″ = 10 1/2″
height = (2 * 5 1/4″) + 1″ + 1″ = 12 1/2″

With a tuck depth equal to the seam allowance, the seam calculations become very tidy:
start seam 1/2″ down from top and 1″ in from side
sew diagonally down/out until 1/2″ in from both bottom and side
sew straight down to bottom at 1/2″

The bag given in the instructions beginning this post was designed to the the same height but an extra half inch wide and with a 1 1/4″ base:
width = 9″ + 1 1/4″ + 1″ = 11 1/4″
height = (2 * 5 1/4″) + 1 1/4″ + 1″ = 12 3/4″, rounded up to 13″

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From left to right, these are Relaxation, Invitation, Ornamentation. Click to embiggen; the next larger size would have made them taller than my browser window, and I find that super annoying on other sites.

My hubby took some fantastic closeups of them that I’ll share two of:

These will be on display at the Upper Valley Food Co-op in White River Junction, VT, as part of their Earth Day art show. I believe they are up for three weeks starting today, and there’s a reception 4-6 PM today.

A bit on the making: The hoops are 12″, 10″, and 8″ wooden embroidery hoops painted with acrylics; two are over 12″ scrapbook paper. Each has a two-layer fabric “frame” perhaps with other fabric elements and a hanging ribbon that originated on a candy package. The webs are nylon filament sold for beading and the dewdrops are Mod Podge Dimensional Magic, a material I’d been looking for an excuse to buy and try.

The smaller spider is thread and wire (and a loop of filament leading to the hanging thread), held in place with friction and Fray-Check. The bigger one is wire and beads made rigid partially via Jewel-It embellishment glue. The wire lettering is also held in place by Jewel-It. I used steam (was going to say an iron, but that implies touching) to “block” the nylon, which shrinks it a bit but also helps it take the shape it’s pinned to when heated. That was especially important for the hanging spider, who doesn’t weigh enough to straighten the nylon itself!

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The photo it represents actually came from this blog, from the post discussing the creation of the hat I’m wearing in it. Here it is for direct comparison.

We did not end up using this for the team page as originally intended; the idea sort of fizzled out. I wanted to show it off somewhere, though, and in case you’re curious, I have for you some material lists and process photos.

Visible components:

• Fabric
  • satin (sky, glasses)
  • fleece (white part of jacket)
  • home dec type (dark green trees, gray part of jacket)
  • netting (overlay for gravel)
  • cotton and/or cotton-poly (everything else)
• Sewing thread
• Bulky acrylic yarn (hat)
• Fabric paint (lips and teeth)
• Blanket binding (frame)

Invisible components:

• Flannel (to pad up my nose-cheek-chin region just a tad, though I think it ended up being irrelevant)
• Heavyweight nonwoven interfacing (face/head, line of trees on left, glasses, two full-size backings)
• Fusible web (glasses, mouth)
• Tacky glue (glasses)
• Fray-Check (glasses)

The first two photos are the back view of the piece that formed my head and neck, and a partially laid out background. I used the head piece to help align the background pieces.

Next, a shot I call The Invisible Bozo, and a taste of the oddness of cutting up three or four copies of your face to do a project.

The back, before and after I covered it with a second layer of interfacing and with calico.

Finally, a shot of the finished item lit from the right instead of the left. It really shows how much dimensionality the piece has.

This isn’t a project I would have done without someone telling me “hey, you should to do this,” but it was an interesting challenge. I don’t know what I’ll do with it now, but my rationale for backing and binding it was that if I was going to put as much time into something as I did into this (I didn’t keep track, but 10 hours give or take) then I was going to finish it properly.

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Title, compass rose, and attribution. Since I did the vast majority of the work last year I used that date. And since I am me, I designed the alphabet myself, all the letters in upper- and lowercase, and digits although I ultimately liked the look of the Roman numerals better.

Since blackwork was popular over a long stretch of time I had a lot of options for an era-appropriate script. I found a website called Medieval Writing with lots of examples of scripts and was able to observe my lowercase options pretty thoroughly. I decided to create a blend of 15th-16th century English chancery hand and 15th-16th century French and Italian humanistic minuscule, with an eye to legibility for modern readers. Well, it turned out more to be based on those scripts in the way that TV movies are based on true stories, but I think it has the right flavor. I made the uppercase and numbers by looking at assorted typefaces and online calligraphy lessons, and the ampersand right out of my head. My favorites are the old-looking a, dramatic d, and potbellied U.

I have for you a blackwork alphabet PDF that includes the laid-out text for the map (aside from my name, which I didn’t think would be of much use). I thought it would be useful as an example of kerning the letters even if you wanted to use this for a different project.

After stitching, I washed the map and hung it from a deck chair out back, before I remembered I needed to block it on the ironing board with six or seven hundred pins. Next stop: the frame shop. I’ve never had any of my embroidery framed, so this will be an adventure.

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And there was bag.

The main pocket has no additional pouches or pockets inside it, but there is a flat full-size pocket on either side opening to the outside. The flap, which covers nearly the entire front side when closed, has a secret zippered pocket that could hold pens or flash drives.

The width of this bag was determined by my laptop and its thickness by the width of the braided strap. The height may have been my laptop but was certainly influenced by whatever was necessary to have an entire fabric motif show on each outer pocket.

To make it, I lined the outside pockets and attached them flat to the sides. I constructed the flap pocket on one side of the flap by first adding a strip of fabric to each end of the zipper to extend it the width of the flap. Then I sandwiched the zipper tape between pieces of lining and outer fabric. The lining is stitched away from the zipper through the seam allowances on both sides, and then the upper piece folds down across the zipper. The bottom pocket seam is above the bottom flap seam, largely because I was working with stash fabric for the lining and that was as big as it got, but they share side seams.

I used interfacing on the outer pockets but nowhere else. This was partly because the construction of this bag was so spread out that I’d forgotten by the time I got to the main lining, but partly because I didn’t want the bag to get too heavy.

The strap is machine stitched at the top and bottom of each side and hand-stitched in between to stay nice and smooth. If I’d known in advance how long the strap needed to be I would have constructed the bag from the bottom up, but I did the bottom last, which was slow and awkward. Oh well! It turned out fine. I added the flap before I added the bottom because I couldn’t decide what order things should go in or whether I should machine-stitch the straps all the way down, and I needed to make sure I could fold the top edge down if so. That made finishing it up feel super fast – all that laborious sewing the bottom and hand-stitching the straps, and then boom, just slip the lining in, sew around the top, and done!

Or not done, actually, because as soon as I put my laptop in the strap stretched way out to the point of being uncomfortable. I tried an idea I’d had a while ago: machine-sewing along the center of each strip of twill tape that wasn’t decorated with embroidery floss. I wished the whole time that I’d done it before making the bag because it was quite awkward. AND it didn’t even work. I had to back the strap with bag fabric to take the weight, and attach it less-than-perfectly where the straps meet the bag itself. At first I really hated how the strap came out, but now that I’m used to it, I think it’s all right.

At any rate, now I have a fairly lightweight and pleasingly comfortable cross-body laptop bag that I can use to walk or bike to meetings all summer long.

The post Messenger Bag appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

And some thoughts….
I have no idea how to make the fuzzy tips of the yarn disappear. In amigurumi, you just hide them inside a stuffed part of the piece. Here, no matter how good my weaving job (and I can’t say it’s that good) I can’t seem to hide the very ends of the yarn.

I’m very pleased with the look and structure of my join. It lends the piece such interest.

I like the feel of Red Heart With Love much better than Classic – some of the Classic was almost crunchy off the skein – but it was unexpectedly difficult to find two coordinating shades of gray. After washing, it’s better, but still clearly not as soft.

I’m in no hurry to make another item this large!

So you can see all of it, I undertook some additional contortions to spread it out on the floor. It doesn’t really fit but you can see it pretty well anyway.

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We at the Sew-op decided to make gift bags for the two individuals who take care of the logistics of scheduling and publicity, run our meetings, keep the website updated, and are our interface with the Co-op at large. I decided to make little portfolios to hold notebooks. If project effort is measured from 0 to 10, my settings 3-7 are missing, so I made portfolios that will hold either a notepad or a notebook, 8″x5″ or 8.25″x5″ (Moleskine just has to be different), via a large pocket with both horizontal and vertical openings. There is a slash pocket on the opposite face, and three elastic loops hold a pen which in turn holds the portfolio closed. There were two prototypes before these two, and even the second is not the same as these.

I actually made these ages ago to be given at the June meeting, but then the giving kept getting postponed, so the posting did as well. We finally gave the bags at the September meeting, and as for posting, it gave way to things that weren’t already old news. I have been asked for the pattern by two of my Sew-op colleagues so I’m going to revamp it on the assumption that others might be interested as well. The version shown here is a little fussy (too much pressing seam allowances down and using half-strips of Stitch Witchery to secure them) – not that I withheld the pattern from my colleagues on that grounds!

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I’ve mentioned that I was thinking I’d buy a large basket for this purpose. The local co-ops stock fair trade woven baskets, and some are quite large. They are lovely but I couldn’t seem to settle on one – none of them had colors or patterns I was in love with. Meanwhile, I realized that sewing a lining for the basket, as I planned to do to prevent snags and add pockets, would be nearly as much work as simply sewing a basket.

I bought fabric before designing the pattern and so ended up with a yard and a half of each of two home dec fabrics: a patterned “outdoor” fabric and a solid cotton duck. I could have gotten by with 3/4 of a yard of each, as it turns out, so I’ll have to find another use for the rest.

Staring at the yardstick led me to write down a pattern for a 9″x18″x12″ basket, but I started thinking that was maybe excessive, and calculated out a smaller one as well. To check, I made a paper “basket” that was 8.5″ by 16″ by 11″, with no bottom, and decided that was quite large enough, so I went with the 8″x16″x12″ version of my design (it doesn’t sound like a major change, but the difference is a shoebox plus a kleenex box worth of space). For sturdiness, the basket has an inner layer of thin fleece from my stash – all these sorts of projects seem to use batting for interfacing, so that’s what I was going for.

The basket is twice as big in one direction than the other partially so it will sit alongside pieces of furniture with a lower profile, but also so that it could have some large flat pockets on the inside, for printed-out patterns. I knew I wanted a large flat pocket for the afghan pattern and a large slightly non-flat pocket for the blackwork pattern and hooped map-in-progress. I decided to add a pocket for my crochet hook, and as long as I was at it, some shorter pockets for this and that (embroidery floss, stitch markers, etc). The tall thin hook pocket is flat and the shorter, squarer pockets are not. The shorter pockets also snap to the basket lining at the top, to keep those little odds and ends in place.

So I wouldn’t have to deal with turning down the edges at the top and capturing the fleece and what have you, I bound the top of the basket with bias tape (more extra wide double fold, baby).

The sewing was time consuming (mostly because of pocket construction) and not everything is as flawless as I might hope, but I’ll show you how I made it later in the week. Flaws and all, I am quite pleased with how this came out, and I expect it will come in handy many times in the future. It would be a nice bag for car travel as well as projects.

Now I’m eyeing my threadbare purse…

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Mud Monster Pattern

He’s a sloppy little guy, inspired by frogs and mudskippers — not to mention mud season. The pattern page has more about what’s required to make your own; here I just thought I’d show you an adventure we had. Just to warn you, there are a lot of photos past the cut in this post.

We got a good bit of rain this weekend, so it was perfectly wet. Down by the river, Muddy made a sand castle amid the pawprints and then posed with it.

Afterward, it was time for a little swim.

After a while Muddy was ready to come home. Nothing feels better after some damp, chilly weather than a bubble bath!

Of course mud monsters track all kinds of water everywhere. After all these adventures it was high time to just cuddle up in a towel on the couch.

Make your own!

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Once there were three little pigs whose mother could not afford their keep, so she sent them out into the world.

In looking for materials to build a home, the first pig met a man selling bales of straw. The second met a man selling bundles of sticks, and the third pig met a man selling loads of bricks. Each built a home and lived happily, for a time.

Eventually a wolf came to town and approached the first little pig’s house of straw. “Little pig, little pig, let me come in!” he called. “Not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin!” the pig called back. “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”

And he did. The pig ran off to the house of wood, but the next day the wolf came calling there. “Little pig, little pig, let me come in!” he called. “Not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin!” the pig called back. “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”

And he did. Both pigs ran off to the house of brick, where the wolf came calling the day after. “Little pig, little pig, let me come in!” he called. “Not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin!” the pig called back. “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”

And he huffed, and he puffed, but he could not blow the house in. He called out again, “Could I come in, little pigs? My allergies are killing me out here. I’ll order a pizza!”

That sounded good to the little pigs, so they let the wolf in. Indoors he soon stopped huffing and puffing, and they all ate pizza.

In brief, the credits from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are to Stumpy and Cirrus Monster, D.L. Ashliman, CopyCatFilms, and Dieter Steffman.

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