A Bit of Bag Making
6:00 PM Creative Space , Sewing , Teaching 24 Comments

It's amazing how easily life gets busy and next thing you know it's five weeks into the school term and we're half way out to the next school holidays!

Friday just gone was my last sewing lesson for this term. Maybe you remember the bag I talked about making with the girls in class? It was a fantastic pattern to use with them and there was great satisfaction in having a cool bag they'd made themselves. Thanks, Meg! (The pattern was kindly donated to me by Meg McElwee of Sew Liberated for use in class. Make sure you ckeck out her website for more great patterns!)

This is my bag in it's current everyday-use state (you might notice I changed it a bit from when I first made it - I swapped the front and back around and shortened the body so it wasn't as deep.)

I decided to give the girls a bit of a challenge (and save the parents money on fabric) and told them to find old clothing and sheets to use for the bag. I wanted to encourage the idea of re-using materials for projects.

This bag was made from an old denim skirt (dark fabric), a pair of jeans (light fabric), and two shirts (red and patterned fabrics). We used the back of the skirt as the back outer panel of the bag, leaving the patch pockets as they were so she has two funky pockets on the outside!

This bag was made from an old denim skirt and a couple of shirts. The button sewing was an extra skill they got to learn. For some of the girls, when I had them last time it was the first time they'd ever sewn before!

I could see that some of the girls would finish with time to spare so had asked them to bring along some extra fabric to whip up a quick and simple bag using the basic concepts they'd learnt with the first bag. It was encouraging to see how much they'd taken in and that I only needed to point them in the right direction or ask "What do you think you do next?"

Looking forward to next term when I get to do it all again with the other four girls in the class! (I only have half the class at a time while the other half does cooking and they get the option of sewing or woodwork so I didn't have any boys!)

I don't have any photos of the other two girls' bags - one finished the week previous and the other hadn't finished by the end of the lesson as she'd had two lessons off sick.

Check out the other creative folk over here.