WIP – Two Zip Hipster (Bright Lights)

This week I’ve been doing a bit more sewing than knitting. I picked up a bunch of fabric, and am making a Two Zip Hipster bag out of two fabrics from Timeless Treasures’ “Bright Lights, Big City” collection (it’s surprisingly hard to find a place to link to that has both fabrics).

So far I’ve got the entire outside of the bag made, so all that’s left is to sew the inside and put it all together. Maybe I’ll be done by Friday, which would be awesome.

This bag has a lot of pieces, but they’re all rectangles so it was super easy to cut. The tricky part was figuring out how to keep my pieces organized, but then I found small Post-It notes and everything was well in my world!

I’d forgotten how boring top-stitching a long strap is.. the straight line that NEVER ENDS OMG!

But then I got to the pocket, and everything was more interesting. In retrospect, I love my lining fabric so much that I almost wish I had made the outside of the pocket with it, too.

Sadly, my zipper isn’t as straight and perfect as I would have liked. My new sewing machine has a different kind of zipper foot than my old one, and I’m still working out the kinks on how exactly to use it. But hey, the zipper is there, and that’s what matters!

Then, when it came time to assemble the outside of the bag, I found that the front of my bag was .75 inches smaller than the back of my bag, when they should have been the same size. Come to realize that what I thought was 3/8″ on my sewing machine was actually 1/2″, so a few of my seam allowances were too big. NUUUU!!

So I’ll have to trim down the other pieces to make it all fit, and my bag will be a little smaller than it was meant to be. Not the end of the world, but still a bit saddening, since I thought I’d been doing pretty well. I still love my sewing machine, but clearly there’s a bit more learning curve to it than I thought.

Here’s the outside of the bag, which is where I’m at currently (excuse the awful cell phone shot).