Making a Gingham Bag #2 - 14 January 2025

Above is a close-up of the classic black and white gingham fabric that my friend bought for the bag. The actual gingham is very small in real life. The fabric has nearly no stretch vertically but sideways it has quite a lot of give so we’ll need to be sure that the fabric doesn’t stretch too much and loses its shape.

My friend managed to find the above information when she bought the fabric from Amazon. As it's now discontinued there would be no way of buying more. It's a good job then that she bought 2 metres of it; that's about £10 pounds or around 60 Steem, which is enough for about 3 or 4 bags because the fabric is so wide.

A very big advantage of using a fabric like gingham is that the lines of the design are useful to line up the pattern pieces so they are as straight as possible.

Cutting was done by my friend and perhaps the scissors need to be a bit sharper but I guess this will not cause any major problems when sewing.

Although we have more than enough, we didn't want to just waste the fabric to have a very long strip of cut fabric, eg for the base. We therefore decided to change the instructions a bit. Where it clearly indicates to put the fabric on the fold we added a seam. We had to add one cm seam allowance to that section so the length ends up being the same, but the bottom will not be in one piece but in two identical pieces.

Once cut the bag does look a bit plain but this is our prototype so we’ll just get on with the sewing. Before that we had to also cut the same pieces out of the lining fabric.

The actual colour of the lining material is closer to lilac rather than the colour above but the lighting is not great in that room. The lining fabric was just a polycotton bought at around the same price. This has no give whatsoever so it should help the bag keep its shape.

I'm looking forward to start the proper sewing next.

Thank you for reading !