Session 6: Travel Purse

All right are you ready to make a super fun and exciting travel purse? This purse is designed perfectly to fit say your passport and your wallet. You can wear it cross body. So it's secure and it has all these different zipper compartments. So you can put whatever you need in it. When you're on the go we're going to make this out of ripstop nylon with nylon zippers and nylon webbing and nylon ribbon. So this is a almost 100% nylon bag. I think the only thing that's not nylon are possibly these little plastic clips, but I could not confirm if they were made of nylon or not. They might be. So let's set that aside for a sec and talk about everything you need to start this project. Now, you're going to want to make sure that you use the content provided with this class so that it will give you a cutting guide. So you can cut your fabric ready to rock for our segment here. And when you cut everything out you're going to have a small piece, a medium piece a large piece, and then the backing piece. So small, medium, small, medium, large backing. Now I have made my three sections different colors because I like it. And also, because it's easier for me to explain to you which section we're working on as we go through you could of course make this out of all same color or two different colors, whatever floats your boat. You could use different, you know, a print knit, print nylon fabric, and just use matching ribbon. And it would look super great. So small, medium, large, and the backer which is sort of the extra large. Okay. And then, you also have a small loop which actually forms the pocket. So that's kind of how the pocket will look when it's in there and a medium loop which forms the medium pocket out of blue. The large pocket is created using the large and the extra large pieces. So don't worry if you think you're missing one, you're not you just need the medium and the small. In addition to that, you're going to need three zippers that are 9 or 10 inches. And you're of you want to go ahead and prep them to be sewn in. So you can see if you look closely I have stitched across the ends here. I just use a narrow zigzag stitch. We went back and forth a few times across the teeth so that it would capture it and keep the zipper pull from pulling off. You can also use a needle and thread and just make a bar tack real quick, that way, whatever you prefer it's it's, you know, however you want to do it. So prep those to be roughly eight inches wide. You need some ribbon. You want three pieces of blue ribbon. As you can see here on this bag, we have two pieces of the teal, three pieces of the green, and one piece of purple. And I ran out of blue ribbon. So for this bag, I'm going to make it with two pieces of purple and only two pieces of blue. I use the three different blues so that this blue section would look larger, but you could always do this one with purple, whatever you prefer. So in addition to that, you need some nylon webbing to use as your strap, roughly 60 inches, everything you need exact measurements are going to be provided in the cutting guide that is downloadable. So refer to that and then, you're going to want two D-rings. I have these little plastic black guys. You could get silver, gold, whatever color you like. They make them in all different colors now. So shop around and find one you like and then a slider, which looks like this and it's kind of indented on the back. So it's easy to slide along the strap and you need those guys. And I like to have my clips on hand instead of pins and a micro Tex needle in as we've discussed and polyester thread. All right our very first step let's move some of these things out of the way is to actually press down some of the edges of our pieces. So as you can see here we have on the medium loop I've pressed this one quarter inch wrong side to right side same for the small loop. And our extra large piece has that as well. So you can see, we have these three pieces. I've pressed the one quarter inch wr, so towards the right side, this is the right side here Folded over like that. And our final thing, actually, I guess now I think about it. This is the right side. So on the large one, you're going to press right side to wrong side but these two press the wrong side towards the right side. So that'll clear that up. Okay. So those are all ready to go. I'm going to set aside my loop my small loop and my small front piece. The rest of these are not pressed. There's nothing special to them. That's just how they are in there and just set them aside for right now as I do not need them. Okay. Our very first step is actually creating a French seam with the non pressed side and the small front piece. This is just going to be in place to make it extra strong. Now I've gone ahead and sealed all my edges. You of course do not have to seal your edges if you do not want to, because we'll encase most of them and we're going to put right sides toge, or wrong sides together. So we're going to line that up and you can see my, Oh I've cut my piece a little too long, which we'll trim up in just a moment, but, I'm just going to do this real quick. So I want to use one quarter inch lower your needle, back stitch, and then I'm just using my fingers to hold it in place. And stitch along the one quarter inch line you can use your clips or you could pin within the seam allowance. It's a one quarter inch steam allowance. So it's pretty narrow. And we're almost at the end here. We're just going to reverse. Okay. Hmm. Slide that away. And actually I cut mine a little too large. So I'm going to simply trim off that extra. If you cut yours too large, this would be a good time to do it as well though. You probably won't because you will have an expert cutting guide prepared by me just to use at your leisure. So clip your threads. Now you would want to maybe press this, but I'm going to finger press it real quick. And we're going to fold that up. Like so, so that the right side is out on the small front part here. This edge now is going to be attached to one of our zippers. Now, bear in mind that you want to keep all your zippers going the same way on the purse so that you pull all one direction. Because if you put one in the pulls this way and you put the next one in, so it pulls the other way. You might get confused as you use it. So pick a direction and stick with it. All right, now, I'm going to use a few of these clips And actually here pins would work just as good. And I want to make sure that I'm lining this up with kind of evenly between my two bar tacks. As we stitch this entire piece together, we will create more of bar tacks but just to be on the safe side. Oh, and it's important to leave with just a little bit of room between the zipper and the fabric so that it doesn't get bunched up in there on accident. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and baste that, directly to my zipper, which means I need my zipper foot pop that out and think about how you're stitching. So I'm going to put my zipper foot on so that it's aligned on the left side and, all right, check. I'm going to pull off my clip. And I just put my zipper foot right up next to the zipper and insert my needle and then keeping my zipper foot right against the teeth of the en the zipper, zip stitch down, the length of the small fabric. Of course now I'm approaching my zipper. So I'm going to stop. Keep my needle in place, raised the presser foot pull the pole past, then lower the presser foot again and then just make sure everything's nice and smooth and stitch right along. Essentially what we're doing here is we're sort of pre basting this fabric to the zipper to make it all that much easier when Put our, Ooh, there we go. Ribbon in place. Now, I have found when working with this ribbon that it's sometimes helps to spray it with spray adhesive which I treated this one with spray adhesive beforehand. So I'm going to press that so that it just covers that upper edge of the upper fold there in place. And we will clip it to the edge. We're not going to start, Oh, that's where we're starting. So we'll, we will clip it to this other edge Down here. Okay. And we're just going to top stitch along. We're going to do two rows of top stitching or one, whatever you prefer. I like, I like two, but yeah, we can try it either way. So we're going to just stitch along here with our zipper foot, it's already attached to the fabric. So if you really wanted to you could just do one stitch right down the middle of your ribbon. It's whatever you think would look best. Okay. So we're going to just attach the ribbon. You could do it any way you want. I'm going to line mine up and do one along the upper edge. So you want to put your needle down and push the ribbon right where you want it. And then back stitch a little ways. There we go. And smoothly just keep that ribbon in place with your fingers as you work your way along Now, we're at the zipper pole. So needle down, presser foot up, zipper pull past. I don't remove my clips. I can keep my ribbon nice and smooth. We'll just stitch right along that edge there. Okay. Now we're going to clip our threads, of course. Kinda straighten it out with our fingers. And you can see we have one row of stitches and that will actually hold it in place. Fine. If you're worried about the ribbon coming up it probably won't because it's just three eighth inch grass green. It's probably not going to pop up, but if you are concerned go ahead and do a second row of stitching on that lower edge there. And I would recommend using your zipper foot when you do that. So our small section is now for the most part ready to be assembled onto the larger bag. You actually want to prep your small section and your medium section, which is going to be basically exactly the same. So you can see here, I've done the exact same thing to this medium section. I just did two rows of stitching on that. As opposed to one, I've got my zippers going the same direction. And now that seam is totally in case. So we did a French seam up there and everything's nice and sturdy. So we're ready to, Attach the small section to the large section. So you want to take your, the loop. That's going to create the pocket on the wrong side here fold it up to that upper edge, like so and we'll just kind of clip that there for a moment. Okay. So we're going to attach that loop, the folded over portion of the loop to the upper edge of the zipper. And we're going to then pull the medium part so that the little loop that it has, you want to roll that up and clip it. you can just clip it to the upper part of its own, It's upper zipper, if you so desire, but you need to make sure it's out of the way, because we are going to be attaching that small pocket to the medium sized pocket as we go. I like to use clips on this part, and then we're going to use some pins in the seam allowance on this part. So we want to look at this right side up and we want to get it all lined up. So you're looking actually at these lower corners here make sure that your loop underneath is actually in place line up those corners and then, we're going to pin right along those portions right there. And we're pinning in the seam allowance. So that any marks that we might make on the fabric will never be seen. In fact, this is going to be deep, dark inside the bag. So it's never nobody's ever going to say, Hey, why'd you marry your fabric that way, because they won't even know. Okay. So now that that's in that format, we're going to line up, okay. this upper edge and use a few pins right there. Oh, thread Okay. So we want to make sure we've got all three together, and, pin through very carefully so that you're just getting right on the edge and we're going to put some ribbon over this. So nobody's ever going to see that We're catching the top of your head. there we go. Like so, whoa there you go, And one more just to make sure we're all set. I'm going to remove my clip. Okay. So double check that everything's nice and smooth and we'll baste this to the bag body. So we're now making the we're just going to stitch right here along this upper edge with our zipper foot we need to switch the zipper foot to the other side. So we're going to use the right side of the zipper foot. So then we'll stitch the ribbon over it and everything will be right in place. K Now, reverse And just keeping your zipper foot right along the teeth and kind of making sure everything stays nice and lined up. As you go remove pins of course, don't so over pins You could, you could put your eye out. That's what my grandma says. All right, we're now at the zipper. So we're going to lift the zipper foot but leave the needle in, pull it past. We're gonna be doing that quite a bit because we're sewing three zippers in today. So, just, just stitch right down that edge there, and Back stitch, and if we're all agreeable, here we go. We're ready to rock. Okay. So at this point, we want to go ahead and add our ribbon to the upper section. You would take your ribbon like so, you can see a little bit of that glue there, that I use the temporary spray adhesive. And you would just put it here now on the sample bag, you'll see that this is actually blue because I wanted the blue section to look larger. I of course ran out of blue ribbon. So I'm going to put purple here. And then just as you did with the other ones you're going to stitch that on. You can use one row of stitches or two, whatever you prefer make sure that this loop is out of the way. Now, once you've finished stitching that on, you're ready to get your bag more assembled. So you're want to take your, your large, your large piece and the large, extra large backing pieces. And these are kind of assembled differently than than the, the two, the smaller ones because you don't need a loop for it. The actual arch piece is going to encase it and create a pocket and cover up those loops. So what you want to do here just like you did with that one, you're going to line up. You don't have to worry about putting a loop underneath. You're just going to have your one large piece. Not the large back piece. You would align that here along the zipper, as we did on the other one with your ribbon and stitch it on in place. And you can do two rows of stitches. As I mentioned, just as we did with the other ones. So that then you're ready. Once that's in place you would unclip this leave your extra large piece out of the picture for the moment Move your, um, your loop for the blue piece. You want to fold that up so that the fold goes away and along the upper edge. And then all you have to do is pin the pieces together as such in stitches. We just did on this piece. And then you would add your ribbon up there So, that's all ready to go. So once you have that, it's going to look like this. Hm. As you can see, we've attached the small, and the small loop as we did the other one, we attach to the medium with the medium loop, and we put the ribbon on and then we did the large piece with the ribbon here. And then I went ahead and I've done one row of stitching along this upper ribbon here. And we're ready to actually start putting our full bag together. Now, before we want to so what we would do is we would stitch around like this, but before we get ready to do that, we actually need to prep the straps, the strap holders. So you're going to take your two two inch pieces of nylon webbing And your D-rings. And we're going to set that aside for a sec. You want to basically just put your nylon webbing through the D-ring whichever side you think is prettier. These are identical on each side, and I'm going to just clip that in place real quick. Same goes for this one. Okay. And now I'll show you how to prep these for use in your bag. So We actually don't really need the zipper foot for this part but we're going to use it for the next step. So it doesn't hurt to keep it on. So remove your clip, place, the strap holder under and keeping about a quarter of an inch away from the edge. So a quarter inch seam allowance, or as you see here I can align my zipper foot with this, the bar of the D-ring we're going to just baste this closed so that we know that we're ready to go when we start stitching the full bag together. So just stitch along and I I'm using dark black thread for this, so that the stitches show up for you but you certainly don't have to you should probably use matching threads so that it looks nice and neat. Okay. And I'm actually going to go ahead and chain stitch these, which means that I can get some extra stitching done. There we go. And that, chain stitch it just means you take a few stitches between and you can keep going. It's a great way to streamline your work and kind of do an economy of movement. So that you're all that more productive during the day. Okay. And the chain piecing is simple. It often use saying quilting, or if you have lots of different pieces, you're assembling you can see there's just a chain of stitches between those two paces that I can clip off. All right. And I have treated the ends of this nylon these nylon pieces, the wedding, so that they will be nice. And they won't fray I ran them over my hot iron attachment. Okay. So you can see barely, barely barely right on the edges here. I have these two marks. Those are three quarters of an inch in, from the edge. I'm going to align, going to pull this zipper this way. So that's not in my way. Okay. I'm going to align the, the this side of my nylon webbing with that mark, and same goes for over here. So I guess we want that zipper about halfway and then you kind of want to make sure that that black stitch, that you did maybe doesn't show so you can push that up a little so that it will never be known. And we're going to stitch right along the upper edge here. We want to make sure that it attaches to the ribbon and the zipper and that they're in place and on the right side of the front here. And we, I'll show you why in just a moment so that when you turn it really so that when you turn it right side out the strap holders are outside the bag, as opposed to inside the bag where you don't really need a strap. Okay. So again, I'm just going to put my leave my zipper foot on align the edge with the edge of my fabric or the bump there from the D-ring. And mine is not lined up right there. Here we go. And of course, you may, you may need to argue because you're putting two slippery things together. And those, sometimes they sometimes have arguments as you may be aware. Okay. Just stitch that there we're basically just basting it. Cause we're going to stitch over it one more time. So you want to make sure it's in place. I'll do the other guy real quick so that everyone is ready to go, Okay I'm back stitch, and grand. It's not the neatest or tidiest job, but it's basted. And it's in place so that you are ready to finish up the outside of your bag. So you can see those are held on when they're used they'll fold up like this, but for now we need them folded this way. So the next step, and now this is very important. Don't forget to open your upper zipper. These zippers can be wherever you please but the upper zipper must be open or else you'll never get it, and you'll just not have a bag. You'll have a lump of all that lovely nylon you stitched together. Okay. So I'm gonna take my folded edge right up here. I'm gonna put it right along the upper edge of the ribbon and using my clips and some pins. We're just going to Stitch, all the way around the bag. And because we have that zipper open, we do not in fact, Oh it would be good if we get all the pieces together. So because we're leaving the zipper open we do not need to leave an opening to pull through because that zipper is the opening we will pull through. Okay. So once you have it, like so you just stitch all the way around some tips about stitching that I recommend doing your upper edge first just stitch it straight down and then stitch down the edge and around you want when you get to your zippers, you can feel them in there. They're thicker than the other parts. Back stitch a few times over them to bar tack those for this portion, you want to use one quarter inch or even a half inch seam allowance would be fine. You just want to make sure that you're encasing the zipper so that it will work and that you're catching all of the layers. So if one quarter inch is too thin it's okay to do a half inch. It will make your bag only a little bit smaller but you'll have everything in case nice and secure. So once you have finished all of that once you've stitched all the way around You will have A bag just like so. You can see that was where our large piece was. And we stitched along the upper edge here Pop out for me. And then we stitched down and around. And I ba, I went back and forth on those zippers. Now, now that you have it at this point you're ready to clip the corners and turn it right side out because the bag body is finished. But I know what you're thinking. There's a strap on that. And I don't have a strap on mine. So I'm going to show you how to do that. But first you need to consider how you want to finish your seam allowances inside the bag. So these I've actually already pretreated and they have been seared so that they're not going to unravel. So I'm actually comfortable leaving mine as is. However, if that worries you, you could bind them. So you could use bias tape or even bits of nylon fabric that you have sort of as as a bias binding to work around it. You could, you could zigzag or overcast, stitch the edges whatever makes you feel that they are most secure. So either way, your bag is now ready you can clip those corners turn it right side out and we'll make your strap. And of course, poke your, poke your corners out. So they look nice and neat. Okay. So the strap is not actually all that difficult. You need your big piece of nylon. And you're a little slider. What you're going to do is, uh, place the nylon through the slider like, so and then you kind of need it to be pretty close. You have to bear in mind that you have to be able to stitch this. So whatever you're most comfortable with, I used you can see on this slider here, I did about about an inch and a half, and I stitched it. So what we're going to do is we're going to pull that through a little more so that there's an inch and a half pulled through. And now again, I'm using contrasting threads so that we can see the stitches easily. So I would highly recommend getting matching thread for this. We're going to just stitch across where those two edges meet and capture the slider right inside so that it stays put and functions as a bag. So my first row of stitches is going to be essentially one zipper foot away. Now I could put my zipper foot on the other way and get even that much closer which I will go ahead and do fold that down. Okay. Just stitch right across. There are a couple of different ways you can do this. I'm just doing three rows of stitches. You don't have to do three rows. You could do the box formation with an X through it. So you would stitch a little square and then put an X through it to secure it, whatever you prefer whatever you think would look nicest. I'm actually not even clipping my threads between the stitches, just because I can clip them after. And I'm saving myself some time you put the needle up I'm just aligning that edge of stitches with my Ooh. Hmm. And sometimes you just go too fast and right off the edge. And we'll reverse one more time. And those three lines of stitches should do it. You can always put in additional ones. If you think that the strap is going to come undone you can, you know, you can make the box with the X. You can zigzag it. Whatever stitch you think is best. So as you can see, we have the three lines of stitches. We could clip these little jump stitches in between. If I had my threads, snips this would be much easier of course but you're ready to actually attach it to the bag. So all you have to do is then, place this piece, through Oh, first. Okay. Before you placed that piece through, you want to get your bag and put your free end that doesn't have this slider on it through your D-ring and you can attach that like, so but you need to make sure that then you also slide it through your slider before you attach it. So put it through your D-ring, slide it through your slider. So that then it catches the D-ring. This is what's happening here so, this might be easier to see if we do this. So see, I've slid mine through the D-ring that's there. And then I attach this piece to this side. And so it creates a loop and then you can expand it extra wide. As you see with this one, and here you can see I just did two rows of stitching to attach it the same way. But as I mentioned, you can do the box formation, zigzag whatever you think is most secure. So don't forget. You want to just loop that through and make sure it's not twisted. Cause that's going to be annoying down the road and go ahead and slide it through. And then you have your travel bag and it's ready to go. And it looks pretty great. So as I said, make sure to make this project yours go ahead and do the three different color pockets. If you like or do all of them the same color get some fun print nylon and stitch it all up. Make sure you have matching ribbon of course or get some fancy ribbons to add. You don't necessarily have to use nylon ribbon for it. It will look great, no matter what you do, and it will hold everything you need for your next adventure. That's basically all you need to know about nylon in the whole world. There might be a few other things out there but that's all I have to share with you. So I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope you're ready to get stitching and stitching up some nylon today.