tote bag – notes from a mad housewife

i really needed to do some sewing for the kiddos, so for the last couple weeks i’ve made almost exclusively kid stuff. i’ll try not to bore you too much, but i take the same approach with kid makes that i do my own. good techniques, finishing, etc. if you phase out, i totally understand. in fact i only follow a handful of sewing blogs that feature almost exclusively kid stuff. why? well a lot of it is way too crafty for my tastes and frankly, too picturesque. i mean really. who let’s their kids run around in a field of flowers with the sun at just the right angle to get that lovely glint… whatever. recently i have relented and added a few of those blogs to give me ideas for using up my too small to make anything for me fabric leftovers. so, while this may look like a kids’ make blog for a bit, things will return to normal in no time. promise!

first up: a tee for my boy, oliver. i got this stripy knit from girlcharlee.com and went back to the RTW tee tracing i made up here. i roughly graded it up a size so it should fit him awhile. when i finished the shirt i hadn’t put a pocket on the front and he promptly asked me where the pocket was. okay fine—i added a pocket and he said: “okay, now it’s finished!” the boy loves his pockets!

don’t you just wanna squish him? he’s the most cuddle-tastic kid ever.

next i wanted to make a new tote bag for my daughter, anastasia, to give to her as a birthday gift. ohemgeee… she just turned nine. how the heck did that even happen? ahem. so she is a serious lover of books. she began reading at a very young age and by the time she was in kindergarten she had abandoned the picture books in favor of the boxcar children and nancy drew. she reads at an astounding rate (and finishes multiple books every day!) so it’s very difficult to keep an adequate supply of reading material. when we make our library visits, her tote bag is filled to the brim.

craptastic pic… this color seriously messes with my camera!

i noticed that having a wider based tote would make it so much easier for her to fill her bag—the 3-4″ bases most tote bags offer are just too narrow—so i cut the bag to have a wide 6″ base. instead of cutting off the excess at the bottom corners i topstitched it to the outside for a little extra book carrying durability.

i used leftover fabrics from my most recent pair of shorts and the jacket i made for her last fall. i picked up some quilting cotton to line the tote bag and make some interior pockets. she has a pocket to hold her kindle, another pocket to hold pens/pencils/etc. the other side of the interior has a zippered pocket.

the pocket kinda disappears in there thanks to my awesome pattern matching. 🙂

as a whole the bag turned out great! the only thing i was kicking myself for was not making the straps long enough to extend the whole width of the facing so i could topstitch an X for reinforcement. i used the triple stitch for all the topstitching since i didn’t have enough foresight to pick up topstitching thread. triple stitching is wicked annoying, but a single stitch just doesn’t have enough beef, imo, for this sort of thing. the bag was well-received and should last her many years to come.