Shoe Bags and a Project Bag

Hi habibis!  Happy Wednesday!

Today I’ve got more bags to show you.  First, I made some shoe bags.  I saw this post on Kellita Makes and I thought shoe bags would be a great idea for traveling.    I went back to the post a couple of weeks ago and clicked through – in October Kellita posted links to several tutorials and I chose this one.  I didn’t follow her instructions 100%.  When you fold the top down to sew the space for the ribbon, she sewed two seams, one at the very top to form a tube.  I skipped the top seam and simply sewed the one bottom seam.

One of these bags was a present for Spry.  I used this cute red check print – gifted to me by our mutual friend Nikki – and rather than ribbons I used (no joke) the straps from my bridesmaid’s dress for my brother’s wedding.  We never used the straps, and when I went to throw them away I thought perhaps I could use them instead.  I ripped the little garment hooks off the straps and threaded them through.  I love the pop of blue against the bright red.

I made two shoe bags for myself, using leftover green fabric from my brother’s wedding quilt.  I made a third bag that’s extra big, for boots or for laundry.

I made a slightly more complicated bag for my projects.  I’m slowly progressing through an embroidery sampler T-Rex gave me, and I wanted a bag large enough that I could just slip it in, with a pocket to carry around my embroidery thread and other little notions that go with it.  I decided to use the leftover green fabric, as well, but I wanted to use a lining just in case, on the off chance that the dark green might bleed onto my projects.  (Paranoid?  Probably.)   The bag is lined in a cream print with little crescents and the pocket is lined in scraps of yellow I’d used to back my grandma’s yellow and orange quilt.

I used batting scraps to make it sturdier.  I quilted the layers to hold them together.

I made this little pocket for notions and I used ribbon and the buttons from my Aunt D for closures.

 

Wine Bags

Hello habibis!  Today I’m going to show you some wine bags I made for Christmas, and a modified one I made for a bottle of maple syrup for Z’s grandpa.  Come back tomorrow and I’ll show you some bags I made for shoes and the project bag I just made myself.

I made the wine bags basically the same way I’ve made them in the past.  See here.  I love this wine glass fabric.  I think this is the second time I’ve bought it.  I couldn’t find my wine bottle fabric – that popped up in my stash later, so I’m saving it for next time I need to make wine bags.

For Z’s grandpa I shortened the bag to better fit the maple syrup bottle.  I used more of the green fabric from Aunt D’s stash – it’s such a nice rich green, don’t you think?

I used cream ribbon for the ties for all the bags.

Cute, right?

Wine bags

I made two wine bags for my parents for Christmas.  Z is giving them wine and I thought it would be nice to make special bags for them.  I had bought wine-themed fabric, originally to make them an apron (my parents only have two aprons at their house, which isn’t enough for the whole family when we’re doing a lot of cooking).  I have plenty of the fabric left, so I may still do that.

I measured a wine bottle and estimate the size of the wine bags based on that, plus the sizes of wine bags listed for sale online.  I wasn’t sure quite how to make the space at the top for the ribbon, and I ended up making each bag slightly differently.

For the first bag, I folded the fabric in half lengthwise and sewed it closed on two sizes, leaving one short side open.

Then, I folded over the edges of the open end and pinned.  I sewed the edges down, leaving a gap open where I could thread the ribbon through.

For the other bag, I made the space for the ribbon first.

Then, I folded the material in half lengthwise and I sewed along the bottom and the long edge.  I sewed up to but not over the folded-over fabric on the top.  (If I’d sewn all the way up, I’d have sewn over the opening for the ribbon.)

In the first case, the ribbon has to be threaded through the inside of the bag, and in the second case, there are rough edges where the ribbon comes out on top.  Either way, it’s not a perfect solution.  (What I could have done was cut the pieces wider and then folded each long edge in about an inch, sewn it down, then sewn over the top edge, and then sewn the long edges and the bottom together.  That would have been an extra step and would have required more forethought.)  I threaded green ribbon through the top of each wine bag and then I was done.

It’s Christmas Eve, and our Advent calendar is now over.  I hope you enjoyed my daily posts.  Toward the end of the month – when things got the most hectic – they were admittedly a bit time consuming, but overall it was fun and I think I’ll miss going back to weekly posts.  With that in mind, I’ll have one more post tomorrow for Christmas Day, just for the fun of it.