Sunday 6 August 2017

Sunday stitching: tea towel project bags

For several weeks, every time I walked past the window of our local Asda a particular tea towel in their window display caught my eye. Eventually I caved and popped in to buy these three beautiful tea towels. I'm not massively excited about housework, but I knew that these tea towels would make beautiful project bags!


A couple of weeks ago I finally spent a Sunday afternoon turning them into bags.

First up, the seaside towels. I decided that I wanted to use the whole design, so unpicked the hems before washing the tea towels ready for sewing. I cut lining the same size as the tea towels, then stitched them into a lined drawstring bag with mitred corners. The bag is huge! I put two 200 g cakes of yarn in the bottom, and they pretty much swam. This is very much a decorative storage bag rather than anything very practical (I also added a pocket on the inside, but it's not very useful as it's too deep and goes into the mitred base. If I make another I'm going to have to rethink the pocket design, and I might go as far as to sew up the pocket on this bag).


The watermelon bag was a much quicker project. I folded the tea towel in half end to end and trimmed the edges off before seaming the sides of the bag (I used French seams to enclose the raw edges). I kept the hemmed edges at the top and bottom of the tea towel to form the bottom of the drawstring casing, which made life easy. The bottom has internal mitred corners, which are loose, but don't seem to get in the way. I love this little bag; it's just the right size for a pair of socks, and is so lovely and cheerful.


Have you done any sewing recently? What's your favourite thing to sew?

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