Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Make Thrift Buy, the show where I...
have a cold. BUT also, you send me pictures of clothes
that you've found on the internet, and I try my best to recreate them!
Today's challenge was suggested by the lovely ada_oline, who wanted me to try out this silvery
drawstring bag. I found this bag on a couple of different sites, including some Etsy stores,
Ebay... I basically found this bag everywhere.
Drawstring bags are pretty simple.
So, we'll get started!
The special materials I needed for this project were some silver fabric, an eyelet or grommet
kit with tools, and approximately 74 inches of rope.
I started out by cutting out my bag material. To do this, I folded my silver material in
half, right-sides together, and on the wrong-side of the fabric, I drew a rectangle that was
13 by 17 inches.
I then put some pins through both pieces of fabric to hold them together,
then cut out the rectangle, making sure to cut through both pieces of fabric. By folding
my material in half before cutting, I’ve saved time by cutting out both pieces at once.
Then, I leave the pins in the material, and I sew around the edges of the bag like this.
I make sure to leave 2 inches not sewn up the top here, and I also don’t sew the top edge.
I’m using an overlocker to sew - because it’s fast and I’m lazy - but you can definitely
also just use a normal straight stitch on a sewing machine, or even hand-sew this with
a needle and thread.
When you’re done, your two rectangles should be sewed together, right-sides together, like
this. And I know you can’t see my stitches here because I was using light-coloured thread,
but they *are* there, and they look like this.
Next, I folded down this top, unsewn edge, by ONE inch, like this.
And then I pinned this edge down all the way around the top of the bag, so that I had this.
And then I sewed all the way around the bag, to create a kind of tube on both the front
and back sides of the bag, like this.
When you get to the side seam of your bag, you should stop sewing, lift up your needle
and cut the threads, and start again on the other side of the seam, so that you get two
tubes, one of the front and one on the back of the bag.
When I was done sewing, I turned my bag the right way around! And, I also pushed out the
corners of the bag using a ruler.
Then, on the two bottom corners, I sewed over the top of each corner like this. Just make
sure that this corner is big enough for your eyelet to fit inside.
Okay, so now it’s time to set the eyelets! Now, this is the eyelet kit that I bought.
DO NOT get this brand of eyelets – which is called Sullivan’s – this kit was totally
wrong and incomplete just and didn’t…. work. And also led me to ruin most of my eyelets
while I was practicing, and, as you can see, my table!
Anyway, I got it to work because I found an anvil and a tool that I could use in another
button kit that I owned – Thanks, NEWEY – so I inserted my eyelets by making a little
hole in the middle of that corner triangle, making the hole bigger using a pen, inserting
this larger eyelet piece through the hole, placing the anvil underneath, then placing
the washer over the top, putting this tool thingy in the middle, and then bashing the
whole thing down with a hammer. Which gave me this pretty eyelet in my fabric. Hooray!
I repeated this on both the bottom corners of the bag.
Now it’s time to add the bag straps. So, I cut myself about 74 inches of rope.
Then, I threaded the rope as follows:
First, through one of the eyelets, and I tied a knot in the short end.
Then, I inserted a safety pin into the other end of the rope to help guide it, and I threaded
the rope through the top tube.
...and then I pulled it through until the strap on the left
was about the right length for a bag.
Then I threaded the rope through the BACK tube, and out the other end.
And I pulled the excess rope all the way through.
Then I threaded the rope, once again, through this TOP tube. So, there are two layers of
rope going through the top tube now. Because of this, it can be a bit hard to get the rope
in there, but keep persevering and you’ll get it there eventually.
I pulled this rope all the way through, and then threaded it though the last eyelet...
...and I tied a knot in the end, and snipped off the excess rope.
Then, I tried the bag on, found the rope to be a little bit too long, so I cut it shorter
at the ends and re-tied the knots until both the straps were about the right length.
And that’s it.
So, how did I go?
[music plays]
So - I am *really* please with how this one turned out! And my conclusion is a definite
[scissors snipping sound effect]
Yeah - you can really easily make this for yourself, even if you're a beginning sewer
- in fact, if you're new to sewing, I think that this is a really good project to be one
of your first projects, because you don't have to sew too much, you're only ever sewing
straight lines - in fact, considering how easy this is to make, it's kind of outrageous
the amount that I found for it online. But, if you make this for yourself, and even
if you buy all the materials new, you're not going to be spending more than $10 or $15
on this. So that's it from me for today! I hope you're
all having a really good day, and I'll see you all for my next video.