The bunny bag

I finished the bag I mentioned in the previous post. It's made of slightly stretchy peach colored fabric with cotton and padding for the lining and the bunny picture on the flap. The picture below shows all the pieces. The structure is mostly the same as in the bag with geometrical patterns I made earlier.

This bag has a lining, and it is made in the same way as in the makeup bag, except the top is open. I first stitched the cotton and padding together close to the edges and then sewed the pieces together, leaving 1 cm seam allowances. The inside pocket was made before stitching the cotton and padding together.

I used velcro for closing as I had no buckles left. The front of the bag has vertical pieces of velcro for adjustment, while the underside of the flap has a long horizontal piece. The order of making the flap is as follows: sew the velcro into the underside piece of the flap, stitch all layers together near the edges, sew bias binding to the side and bottom edges of the flap, and finally sew the flap to the back piece of the bag.

The next step was to sew the front, back and side pieces together to form the outside of the bag. Once that is done, turn the bag right side out and insert the lining.

This is the finished bag. You can either turn the upper edges of the lining outside and stitch the edge or use bias binding for the edge. I had some issues with measurements, and it was easiest to cut the upper edge of the lining along the upper edge of the outside and use bias binding.

The shoulder strap was a bit tricky to sew in place, because of the number of layers of fabric, but my sewing machine was just able to manage it. Any more layers would have been impossible. Like with the first bag, I did not make an adjustable strap, because I haven't been adjusting the strap of the bag I originally used as the model, so that length is just right. Note also that I sewed the strap in place last. Normally it should have been sewn before attaching the lining, but as the outside fabric was stretchy, I wanted to attach the strap also to the non-stretchy lining to help the bag keep its shape.

Here is the outside of the finished bag. There are some errors that are due to the peach fabric being stretchy, but I decided to ignore them. This was basically a prototype, just for testing what the result would be like. And the most important lesson I learned is that using stretchy fabrics for something like this isn't a good idea.