Breaking in Life: Learning to Sew...Finally

So the lovely ladies, Sherry at Young House Love and Katie at Bower Power have put on another Pinterest Challenge! This time the challenge was kicked off with a video starring their kiddos! I'd highly recommend checking out their pages for your daily dose of cuteness... now onto what I did:

Now that I'm officially out of grad school, I figured it was high time to dive in and finally learn how to sew. I contacted Sherry on one of her blog posts to see if she recommended her Brother XL2600I Sew Advance Sew Affordable 25-Stitch Free-Arm Sewing Machine for a beginner, and she said she definitely did. I bit the bullet and spent to 80 buck last month. Then the machine sat, and sat and satsatsat around my apartment until the challenge.

There are a bunch of pins out on pinterest specializing in beginners sewing projects or how-to's, but I just ended up doing a separate project to get a handle on my machine.

The man-friend's mother is a genius sewer. She graciously offered up her expertise to finally give me the confidence to take the damn thing out of the box and get it ready to roll. I still wasn't sure what to make(I'm still a beginner!) so she gave me some ideas and some scrap fabric. I went with the beach bag option! And here is the process:

Luckily, the Brother came with pretty clear guidelines how to set all your thread and needles up so after practicing going straight on some scrap fabrics, we wrote a rough outline for what was required for the bag.

I maintained a 5/8 inch hem for all the sewing(and went over all my seems to give it double strength.) I'm a visual person so here are the steps:

I began by collecting all my supplies and cutting my white liner and main fabric to size. I made it so that when they would be sewed into a bag shape they would be a perfect match:

Then, working with the liner first I sewed around the edges, making a 5/8inch hem:

For strength I went around twice, leaving me with this beauty!

The same steps were repeated for the main bag material,

but since I was working with a stripe I tried a little harder to make sure the lines matched up. A look I think I achieved:

This part was a little tricky to figure out. I put the liner inside the main bag. Wrong side of the liner facing out(and the wrong side of the main bag). I ironed down the the hem and pinned around the bag.

Somewhere along the way I miss calculated and the liner was a bit larger then the rest of the bag so I just folded over and sewed the seam down. I did this by the end seem so it wouldn't be as noticeable.

Before I sewed the two together, I added the strap which was just leftover nylon material. Make sure that you measure so that they are placed evenly and are even lengths.

I ended up switched the thread to yellow so that it wouldn't be as noticeable on the outside of the bag. And I made sure to go back and forth over the straps 5 times to add durability to them.

I hemmed around the whole bag, maintaining the 5/8inch seam. But since this seam was a bit too far from the edge, ater some use the tight crease would eventually loosen up and become less crisp.

So, to make the bag look a bit more finished I went around once more just a smidge on the linerto keep the crisp edge!

This bag was a greagreagreat beginner project. All straight lines. Next up, and Apron! That will give me more practice with ruffles, making tube strapes and whatveer else I want to do with it. One thing I wish I had done with this is create a pocket. Though I can't wait to break out this bad boy at the beach or by the pool in 3 months, I think I'm planning on using it mainly to transport my crochet materials. I love it and am glad I finally was brave enough to get it done!