Cosmetic Bags

 

Two cosmetic bags

     I had a fun time making these two cosmetic bags.  I bought a kit from Patched Works that included pre-sewn white zippers and printed batting for two bags.  I bought these in March of 2021 and I chose white as I wasn't sure what fabrics I was going to use.

Old kimonos

     When I was ready to work on the bags, I was searching through my stash and found a bag of old kimonos that I had bought by the pound many years ago.  There were five different kimonos and the pattern called for six different fabrics.  I found a piece of 'sequined' fabric in my stash that matched so now I had my six different fabrics.  At first I was only going to take apart the kimonos just enough to get what I needed for the bags.  After starting I then decided to deconstruct all the kimonos completely, thus having the fabric available for future projects.  That took a couple of weeks to rip out all the seams and press all the pieces.

Kit with pre-sewn zippers

Printed batting

     Following the directions I cut the sized pieces I needed.  I used the lining of one of the kimonos for the lining of the bags.  Even though it warned about not pressing until all sewing was completed, I did press out the wrinkles from the batting.  For the first piece I did forget to stitch around the outline to secure the lining in place, it made the last step harder.

Sewing on the pieces

      Then came the fun of sewing the pieces/strips on, it was similar to paper piecing but here your pieces were cut to the exact size needed and you sewed with a 1/4" seam allowance instead of on the line.  I did opt to do some embroidery on one of the pieces from the larger bag.  After the final outline and trimming, I did use an overcast stitch on my sewing machine to finish off the edges. On the smaller bag I used some ribbon from my stash and a decorative stitch at the bottom of the zipper piece.  For the larger bag, I chose to use a decorative stitch to sew on the zipper piece.  Unfortunately my machine skipped stitches occasionally so it didn't turn out as nice as I had hoped.  Guess the machine needs to go in for some TLC.

  

Small bag

     This was a fun project that I wouldn't mind doing again.  It is a good way to use up small pieces of leftover fabrics.

Large bag