Bags

Christmas Gift Bags
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

This year, I gave bags for Christmas.

In all honesty, each of those bags is also filled with a hand-made gift for four of my lovely family members. But you don't really expect me to tell you what is in them before the 25th, right?

Right.

I've been wanting to do gift bags for a while. This year I hit JoAnne's and found 50% off Christmas-theme fabric. Perfect! And then I went pattern hunting on the 'net. How hard can bags be, right?

Right.

But I found patterns! A lot of them. And I finally settled on this lined drawstring bag. The series of blog posts has several options, and in the end I modified even the plan laid out by "happythings" (but thank you "happythings" for giving me a great starting point!). If you read it and understand what she's doing, then my modifications will make sense. If not, then you'll just have to trust me that what I changed made it much easier to make a bunch of bags!

First off, my sewing skills are iffy. My seams are usually serpentine and let's not even get into me cutting a straight line in the first place. In addition, I hate hand-sewing up the hole where you turn a bag or pillow or whatever to be right-side-out again (I can never get it to look like the machine-sewed seam and that irks me to no end). So I didn't. I sewed the whole thing as per the directions leaving only the spot where the drawstring would go through and then pulled it through that hole. VIOLA! And after making a couple, I didn't see why I needed to make the liner out of two squares--because that's just one more place I can cut things unevenly. So I left the liner as a slightly-shorter-than-the-outside-material rectangle and sure enough, that works just fine!

Hopefully these bags will be unpacked tomorrow, and the contents appreciated on Saturday. And hopefully some gifts can be given in them again, next year.