My youngest granddaughter discovered the movie “Frozen” and fell in love with it. So when I stumbled onto this scrap of fabric with characters from the movie in my stash, I knew just what to do. When combined with some other coordinating fabrics, it almost made itself. Now she can fill it with toys and drag it around the house, as she likes to do with bags of all kinds.
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:
…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.
My eldest granddaughter has entered the Disney Princess phase, with her current favorites being Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” and Ariel from “The Little Mermaid.”
Since she already has a “Belle gown,” I made this Ariel top for her birthday using McCall’s pattern #6022. (I also used that pattern for the top I made for my younger granddaughter.)
It’s so much fun to sew for little girls again 🙂
I needed a birthday gift for a friend and found a tutorial for fabric baskets. To make one basket, I used two of my favorite fabrics from my stash, and broke open a new package of Hobbs Thermore polyester batting. (I keep a LOT of batting on hand!)
This project was fun to make. It used 2 16″ squares of fabric and one 16″ square of batting, plus four buttons. I free-motion-quilted the joined squares and batting before turning them into a basket. Polyester batting makes for a lightweight basket. If you prefer something sturdier, to put heavy things in, you might want to use thicker batting. But the polyester batting worked fine for this project. (I put a couple of bars of gift-shop soap and a bottle of hand lotion nestled in tissue paper in it for my friend.)