This weekend I decided it would be good to spend some time away from the computer, but the weather wasn’t really good enough to get out and do much, so I needed a “rainy day” project. I remembered that I’d signed up for a free introductory Craftsy class a few weeks ago, so I logged in to take a look at what was involved.

I do already own a sewing machine and my mum is a great seamstress, but I am … rather limited in my skills, so I knew I wanted to start with simple things and build my confidence as I went along. I’m also starting to dip my toes into video learning myself, so it was very interesting to see how information is presented in another industry.

The class was the Bag-Making Basics class, which actually has two bag patterns but I particularly liked the first one. Fast forward a few hours (plus a trip to a fabric shop, of course!) and here’s the result:

The one on the left uses the pattern given in the class, you can make it from two fat quarters. The one on the right I amended so that the interior was 18×14 (inches) and the outside stripes were cut out at 6, 6, and 8 inches (all by 14 inches), which is bigger than a fat quarter. In the photo you can’t really see it but the bags are lined with the fabric from the “stripe” across the middle, so they feel quite substantial. The class shows how to sew drawstrings but I wasn’t sure about matchy-matchy fabric ties so I just put in some ribbon instead, which was *much* faster and slides through the channels really well.