Thursday, June 5, 2014

Pattern Test Drive - The Sling Bag by You Sew Girl

Today we are going to show off our new You Sew Girl Sling Bag. It is made out of a lovely Sweet Potato Orange Denim which matches fantastically with the feature panel of Kokka Sun Bear fabric. It is a fairly easy pattern suited to adventurous beginner to intermediate sewist. If you have made any You Sew Girl bags before then you will be able to whip this one up with no trouble at all.


The finished bag measures approx. 25cm x 25cm x 13cm (9-7/8" x 9-7/8" x 5-1/8") excluding the strap. The strap is grown on and can be lengthened and shortened as desired. This is the length straight off the pattern which is fine for a small petite person like our size 8 mannequin here but if you are taller/larger then you may need to lengthen it a bit.

There is an optional zippered pocket in the lining which is handy for holding all of those little bits and bobs that can get lost inside your handbag.

The feature fabric we chose is a bit lighter than the denim so we decided to appliqué it onto the denim rather than piecing the two together. A quick tip for folding over the raw edges of the overlay piece is to use 1/4" Quilter's Edge which is a double-sided iron on adhesive tape. 

  • Cut two strips for the feature panels, one for the front and one for the back.
  • Iron the Quilter's Edge onto the wrong side of each of the long edges, fold over and press again to get a very neat 1/4" seam. 
  • To attached the overlays onto the bag you can either use vliesofix (or similar) over the entire piece or just use more of the Quilter's Edge on the sides (which is what we have done). 
  • Top-stitch 2mm in from the edge of the overlay to hold it in place permanently.
Hardware
You can get away with having no hardware on this bag, though it is suggested to use a magnetic snap as a closure. As always you can add O-rings, oblong rings etc to jazz up and/or lengthen the strap.

Interfacing
The sling bag is a soft and slouchy bag so it can have minimal to no interfacing. The denim we have used is quite heavy so we have used a medium/light woven fusible interfacing on the facing pieces only (excluding the strap facing). There is a hard Peltex base to give the bag some shape.


If you would like to recreate this bag here are the materials that we have used.
- Ky and Cloud

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