Sophia Bag

A while back I got a pattern for the Sophia Carry All by Amy Butler from Sew, Mama, Sew (a really super cool fabric store online). Well, I’ve finally gotten around to at least cutting out the fabric. I’m going to try to take pictures as I go through it, but I’m only so good at that since you get doing stuff and then forget about the camera. But I’ll try. Plus, there’s a sew along that was posted on the Sew, Mama, Sew blog that I can submit my photos to. So that should keep me motivated to take pictures :)But here are the first few steps.

Step 1: Cut out the pattern pieces.

I don’t have pictures of this but I will elaborate on how I did this.

There are a lot of rectangular pieces. For those, I don’t bother pinning and cutting, but I line up the paper piece with a large rotary cutting ruler and then just use the rotary cutter to cut them out.

For the rounded panel pieces, I made a photocopy of the patter and pasted the two halves together. This allowed me to center the pattern over the parts I wanted before cutting. Those pieces (the main panel and pocket panel) I did pin and cut.

Step 2: Cut everything out

Here are all my pieces all cut out. I lay them out like this so that I can keep them matched up. (Plus I had just cleaned my room so my carpet was vacuumed and clear and I was taking advantage.)

Step 3: Make the binding

Here we attach the binding pieces to make one long strip. Fortunately for me, I only needed to cut two bias trips to reach the 3 yards recommended. This is because I was using some mid-weight sorta upholstery fabric (although normal for Amy Butler) that was 54″ wide. Take the diagonal of that and it’s even longer . . . so you easily end up with 3 yards with only 2 strips.

Pin the bias strip around the cotton cording. I think my cording might be a bit big. I’m pretty sure it’s 1/4inch, but it feels big. I would go smaller next time.

Here we have it all pinned. Next we sew using a zipper foot.

Here’s the sewn binding. I think it came out okay. You’re not supposed to sew right up to the cording. Just around it. When you actually sew it to the item, it will make it tighter, but you don’t want to see your first seam–so that’s why you don’t go super close the first time.

Step 4: Apply the interfacing

Apply the fusible interfacing to the corresponding pieces using the manufacturer’s instructions. This basically means to line up the two pieces and lay a press cloth over them. Hold the iron on top of them for 10 seconds, then move the iron to a different place and repeat until you’ve done it for all parts of the piece. And then they will stick!

Repeat that for the fusible fleece to fuse that to its corresponding pieces.

There’s not a whole lot of pictures here because, let’s face it, attaching interfacing isn’t so hard and not that exciting either.

Step 4 to be continued . . .