…as a Christmas gift for one of my daughters, who has always loved pandas. I used two YouTube videos to help me make this bag.

In the first video, the sewist actually uses a purchased placemat to make the bag. This is a clever idea, but I had fabric I wanted to use, so I free-motion quilted my fabric, batting and lining after cutting them just a bit larger than the size of a placemat instead. (The extra space gets taken up by the quilting.) I quilted wavy lines alternately in two directions, and it came out just the way I wanted it to.

In the second video, Jenny Doan of the Missouri Quilt Co. explains how to put in a zipper in a bag, with fabric tabs covering each end of the zipper.

I didn’t have twill tape, so I made pull-tabs out of leftover black polka-dot fabric, which I also used as the lining for this bag.