Bag Finish

I've been working on this bag since Monday, and today I finished it:

Open:

The insides of the pockets:

I really like the finished product, but making this bag was quite a challenging experience. Read on if you are interested, skip the rest of this otherwise!

A friend recently made the "Sew Together Bag", which is not what this is, but which inspired me to make this. There is also the "Bionic Gear Bag", which is not quite what this is. There are other similar bags, such as the German "Zippy Bag", the "Quilters Organizer Bag", a Russian version I don't know the name of because I can't read Russian, and probably more I haven't found.

As I looked at the various options I came across the "Sew Like a Puppet" website. The owner of that website was involved in a legal action against the designer of the Bionic Gear Bag. She has written a book about it, "Sewing Wars", which I haven't read so can't comment on. The blog section of her website is a little over the top, but she has several patterns for sale, including one called "Bionic Gear Bag for Puppets". It was only $5 so I decided to give it a try. (That turned out to be US dollars, unfortunately, even though I believe the seller is in Australia.)

I have made a few bags before, mostly from patterns designed by Nicole Mallalieu of "You Sew Girl". Nikki's patterns are well-written and well designed. Her instructions include photos and diagrams, and are logically set out and easy to follow. She always gets people of varying levels of skill to test her patterns, which is where things like missing steps or unclear instructions get picked up and fixed before publication. This pattern has none of those qualities.

The actual pattern was confusing. Here's a sample of my confusion:

"2 INCHES" printed in a random place on the pattern piece, with my tape measure showing that none of these lines are 2" apart, so I have no idea what that measurement refers to. There's a missing dotted line that I have added in, and an extra one I have scribbled out.

There are no diagrams in the instructions, which is a shame because some steps really need more than just words. There are some photos on the last page, but they are not labelled and have no explanation so are not really a lot of help.

The cutting instructions didn't seem to work with the sizes of the sections on the pattern piece.

Almost every piece listed actually needed to be a different size than given, although for a couple of those it was because I wanted to change the distance between two of the pockets. One major part of the bag is not listed, so some guess-work was involved.  You can see some of my scribbles as I tried to work it out, but I have notes written all over this page.

A couple of times I questioned whether this is even meant to be a real pattern, and if I had fallen for some sort of joke in buying it. I was tempted to abandon this pattern and buy a different one, but then I came across the Inch-Art site, where Nina has written a tutorial with lots of photos for the original bionic gear bag. With her photos plus my own pattern-drafting skills and bag-making experience, I persevered.

The first section involves making all the internal zip pockets. Here I will say that the method in the pattern I bought seems a better way to do it. The pockets are formed one by one:

So in this photo the first two zip pockets are complete, and I am working on the third one. I used longer zips than necessary because a) this is all from stash, and b) it is actually easier to use longer zips and cut them down later. I discovered with my first zip that the Janome zipper foot is no good for this type of work, so I ripped that one out, then sewed all the zips with my trusty Elna Lotus. I should have known, because Nikki of "You Sew Girl" wrote about this problem 7 years ago.

Next the side pieces. One:

 Then two:

At this point I read in the instructions that the very front and back pieces should be 3" longer than the side pieces. Mine weren't! (In fact the back wasn't even long enough to reach to top of the sides.) I should have read right through the instructions before making my calculations about how big these pieces needed to be. As it turns out 3" is more than you need, but I had to add some to the front and the back before completing the side seams:

You can see the seam across the back, below the height of the side piece, and the one at the front just in front of the triangle shape. Fortunately I had made the quilted outer section much longer than the pattern specified, or I would have been re-making that.

The sides got their binding, then it was time for the long zip that holds the whole thing together.

This is where a diagram would be helpful. The written instructions for lining up the bag, the zip and the binding were not good enough. I couldn't see how the instructions would give me the correct result, because the layers seemed to be in the wrong order. But then I may have been misinterpreting them; a clear diagram would clear up the confusion. The Inch_Art tutorial's written layering order also confused me, and she used a navy zip and binding so the details were lost in her photos. I played around with the pieces, and read both sets of instructions, and couldn't see how it would work. Fortunately there is a video series by Birdcage and Thread for the "Sew Together Bag", and the 7th video shows how to do this zip. They cleverly basted the zip in place then dealt with the binding later. That was a much better process!

After I'd basted the zip to the bag, I stitched the binding to the whole length of the zip with my Elna Lotus:

Because I wanted to be sure I was sewing straight, I unconventionally sewed with the zip facing down so I could see the lines woven into the tape. That's the back of the zip facing up. When I got to the bag and couldn't see the zipper tape, it didn't matter as I could just follow the line of basting stitches.

I didn't photograph the next step, but after pressing the binding back, I used Vliesofix T6 tape to fuse the binding to the back of the zipper and the bag, before stitching it in place from the front. (You can cut 6mm wide strips of regular Vliesofix/Bondaweb/WonderUnder if you don't have the tape.) That's another trick I learnt from Nikki, and it really helps keep everything under control so you can get a neat finish:

On top of the bag I hand-stitched the binding to lie flat against the bag, rather than stick up as it has a tendency to do with this type of bag:

The final step is to attach a tab to each end of the zip, and stitch it to the base of the bag. The measurements for this tab given in the actual instructions are different to the measurements in the cutting list. I used a combination of the instructions version and my own common sense to get a neat tab. I hand-stitched it to the bag, realising too late that it would have been much more sensible to make these tabs earlier in the process, and stitch them into place with the side binding. They could have sat there ready for me to attach the zip/handle to them as the last step. Next time!

Here's the tab, hand-stitched to the bag, machined to the zip:

And that's it!

As I said earlier, I love the bag. But I couldn't recommend this pattern unless you have experience making both bags and patterns, and are prepared to do a lot of thinking for yourself.