An Eco-friendly sewing day with The Quilter

I'm such a visual person I almost didn't post this because I don't have very many pictures. The Quilter lives in a beautiful neighborhood, and with the weather supposedly getting wet and yucky, I packed up my little ones and we went to her house. While the kiddos played in the backyard, the Quilter and I set up our sewing machines on the screened in porch and made a few things.

She called me last week and asked if I had seen any good tutorials for reusable lunch bags. What a co-inky-dink, I had a long list of lunch bag, sandwich, and snack bag tutorials to pick from. I got my most of my list from Whipup.net. I printed out my favorites, packed up some of my sewing room and lots of fabric scraps to take with me. We decided to do Betz White's reusable sandwich wrap, and purlbee's fabric lunch bag.

As I said, there aren't many pictures, I forgot my camera and The Quilter's camera was in the same room as a sleeping baby, so we went without.

We started with the lunch bag, which we thought would be more difficult. Honestly, it's a project a beginning sewer can do. It was fun, and probably the hardest part was choosing the button. I will say that my bag turned out better, simple because I used canvas fabric(per the instructions) and The Quilter used a lightweight cotton(ignoring the instructions, as usual) And yes, that's some sisterly one-up manship. She has since decided to take hers apart and line it with some iron-on vinyl. We also accidentally changed the pattern, which happens with us. Instead of using two 9 ½ by 13 inch pieces of fabric, ours were cut to 9 by 13 inches. It was my fault, I was the one umm, more perusing than reading the instructions. It didn’t really make a difference, and we decided we would try a few variations, longer, wider, bias tape lining, etc.

The sandwich wraps were also a lot of fun and very easy to make. It took us a little longer since we ironed vinyl onto the wrong side of some fabric, rather than buying PUL, as it recommends. We had another pattern alteration, again kind of my fault. I printed the template, but didn’t enlarge it as I was supposed to; we did it by hand, so our template was about a ½ inch bigger. Again, it really didn’t make a difference. This was a fun project, mostly because the vinyl made ironing the small seam allowances very easy. I thought the directions took the securing of the Velcro a little far until I unhooked my wrap and the Velcro came right off. In that respect, go ahead and follow the directions exactly. Even with all the interruptions from children and life in general, we had a great time and I’m, definitely going to make a lot more of both of these. The Quilter is thinking of using the lunch bag as party favor bags for G-Man’s upcoming birthday.  They are a great way to use scrap pieces of fabric, and they are quick aand easy to do.

Happy Thoughts!