241 tote

I had a day off of work and I wanted to make a gift for a graduating senior. That means a trip to the fabric store to make a tote bag.

The flower print and blue dots are Denyse Schmidt's fabric at JoAnn's (no idea what line).  The green with white polk-a-dots is just a random fabric I found there.  Saturday night was spent cutting out fabric and interfacing.

I decided to use Anna's (Noodlehead) 421 tote bag pattern.  I've made it before, but after seeing Suzanne's (just another hang up) version I knew I needed to make it again.  I added 1" to the center of the bag and added fleece interfacing.  I adore how they turned out.

I interfaced the outside of this bag with Pellon's 'decor bond' and the lining with fusible fleece.  You can't see it, but the lining is the blue print and the handle is the flower fabric.



For this bag, I added 'decor bond' to both the outside and lining plus fusible fleece.  (I wanted to find out if it made any difference or not.)  This bag is a little more stiff ... but not by much.  It's lined in the green print and the strap is the flower print on the outside and green on the inside.  [It's hard to get pictures of the strap when it's hanging on the fence!]  Just for fun, I added the outside zipper pocket.  Thanks to my handy-dandy glue stick, it was a piece of cake to put in.  I think I'll like it for stashing my keys.  There really isn't anything worse than having to dump out your bag just to find your keys that are hiding in the bottom.

I hope my graduating senior friend loves her bag.