Friday, January 20, 2017

Drawstring Bags--- Woohoo! Project completed!

 My mom commissioned me to make drawstring bags for all the nieces and nephews (and for grandma and grandpa!) for our upcoming summer family reunion. I intended to have them finished for Christmas... but they weren't ready. My (lame) gift was a WIP picture, lol!

But they are finished now! I love each and every one of these little jewels and hope their recipients love them! 
 My FAVORITE part of this project was creating fabric pairings for each applique theme. 
 I loved this cherry fabric and new it would be adorable for the lining. Finding the sweet polka dot fabric with mini cherries for the front was serendipitous!
 For the boys I got to delve into fun 'manly' fabrics! I LOVED the dino fossil lining and ultimately decided the brown and gold batik would complement it and allow the skull to have center stage. 

Another batik for the lining of this dino bag. 
  Two boys are into trucks and vehicles, so they have similar bags. At least, I used the same fabric for the outside and the lining. This made it more economical!


 Two of the gals like horse-y critters-- but one is into unicorns...

and the other prefers the non-mythical horse. (I LOVED the vintage-y horse fabric that I used for the lining. I would have used it for the outside, but it was too busy to provide adequate contrast to the applique. Plus it is pretty light and I figure that would show dirt and love too easily)

This adorable cat fabric is on a pale aqua, though the pics don't really show it. And the kitten fabric inside just won my heart! Oh, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find teal/aqua/turquoise rope for the drawstring! Seriously, I guess it just isn't fashionable right now or something because NOBODY carried it and I looked for months!


  
And one boy is all over the Star Wars thing, so this was a given. Actually, It was challenging to find TWO blue-hued fabrics with the classic Star Wars images. Most fabrics have oranges and blacks and draw more from the new Force Awakens images.  

while pairing fabrics was the most fun, completing the appliques was the most challenging and time-consuming. I don't have fancy anything to help with this process (no cricut/silhouette/embroidery machine), so I found the images I wanted online, edited them to size in Word, printed them out, cut them out, used them as a stencil to trace the pattern on fabric, cut the fabric out, ironed the applique onto the bag, and then machine-stitched a zig zag all the way around the design. Some were pretty intricate, so this process took FOR.E.VER. 



Anyway, I'm just so tickled to be finished! I hope my folks like them! And I hope my cute nieces and nephews LOVE their custom bags!