Sewing Marathon

Yesterday Alexa, Dorota, Donna, and I went to the first annual Sunshine Fibre Festival in Severn at the Orillia Agricultural Fairgrounds. It was a cute, little fibre fest where we saw lots of different vendors from what we customarily see down where we live. After lunch we went to Thimbles & Things- a lovely quilt shop in the same area.

All I was looking for there was a zipper to match my measuring tape fabric and they had one. Yay! So yesterday evening I started sewing everything together. Nothing was terribly difficult, but with four zipper pockets, it was just a LOT of sewing.  Why the extra length on the zippers? They can always be trimmed to the desired size. I usually buy 14" or 16" zippers for this reason. Also when they're trimmed down, the metal stoppers get trimmed off so there's no fear of hitting them with the sewing machine needle.

The Sew Together Bag video tutorials were very helpful. Here's the interior with the side bindings in  place.

And a different view. This is as far as I got last night.

All that I had to do this morning was attach the long zipper that closes the whole bag.

And finally...TA DA! The quilting on the exterior shows up well in this photo. With directional fabric, things were a bit more fiddly.  I had to ensure the word 'Stitch' appeared in the correct orientation (click on the photo to 'embiggen')

even on the zipper tabs that are sewn to the bottom binding. I hadn't cut the pieces in the right orientation so I used some creative sewing to make them work.

This thing will hold a LOT of stuff. It's wide enough to accommodate all the tools one could imagine. The tray on the front is handy for grabbing things whilst sewing.

The side view shows how the long zipper is attached.

I'm very happy with how it turned out. I'd love to make another one but maybe not for a while.

 

Some observations/notes:

• It was very useful to label my pieces with letters and the upward orientation while I was cutting them out.
• I attached the other side of my binding by machine. I did glue it in place and used Wonder Clips to hold things. I tried to hand stitch first but it didn't go well.
• I liked how the quilting on the exterior worked out, however one can just use the same light interfacing as on the interior pieces. 
• If I had used the same colour zipper as the bindings, I wouldn't have had to do as much fiddling to stitch in the ditch when I attached the long zipper binding. I used black thread in the top thread and white for the bobbin thread.
• Rather than paying a fee to watch the Bionic Gear Bag tutorials on the Sew Like A Rockstar website, save your cash and watch the free Sew Together Bag tutorials on YouTube. The construction of the two bags is very similar. Watch them a few times to get your head around all the steps.
• Also, save some trees and save the pattern to your iPad rather than printing all 30+ pages. I only printed the one pattern piece that had to be cut out and taped together