Another Zippered Bag

Zippered bag for my sister

Another birthday popped up in our family, and I needed to make a pretty and useful gift for the birthday girl. So I found a favorite piece of fabric in my stash, and a couple of other fabrics to go with it, and made another zippered bag.

Like the last time I made a zippered bag, I got help from a video on YouTube. It’s one I’ve used before for zipper application tips, but this time I followed the entire process. You can’t beat Jenny Doan’s videos for clarity:

Zippered Bag

I made this zippered bag…..

…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. 

Easy Zippered Bags

I found an article about two-minute zippered bags in my quilt file, which means I tore it out of a magazine at some point over the last 30 years. It’s a bit misleading, because it would take two minutes if you used one piece of fabric for the outside. If you use a string-pieced sample, as they did, but you don’t have one lying around, as they did, it’ll take you a while longer. But it’s worth the effort:

That was fun, so I made another one:

Since I have a little plastic bag of zippers that I bought at an estate sale not long ago for 50 cents, I decided to make a few more. They did indeed take a few minutes each. These are for my grandson and my granddaughter:

I put the zippers at the top of these bags to make it easier for them to use. I figure they can put crayons or their little cartoon figures in them.

I’ll probably make a few more little bags for myself when I get the chance. In fact, I’m already setting aside a few pieces as I go through my stash for just that purpose.