Saturday, April 13, 2013

Butterfly Kisses Diaper Bag

Sorry for the nauseating title :) It's been a while since I've made a diaper bag. I think it's been since last year when I made a half-dozen it a fairly short time. A friend at work asked me to make one that he could fill and give to a friend for her pending bundle. I haven't worked with wee 'un prints for a while, and I didn't have anything else going on so I said yes.

I headed to Joann's to get the fabrics. I've seen them so many times I could sleepwalk to them. So of course they're rearranging the entire store and I felt like I was dropped down in the middle of a foreign county after being drugged. I was so very out of sorts and lost feeling. I commented to a staffer, and they told me it would be like that for a while. I'm not entirely unadaptable, but they had some things here, some things there, and no organization whatsoever. I felt like I was digging through clothing racks in a thrift store to find what I needed--I had to look at each and every bolt, as each and every fabric genre was jumbled together. The fun part was that I had no idea if they even carried what I was looking for anymore, so I did an internal happy dance when I found the goods.

Three nights of cutting, fusing, stitching and pinning and I've got this to deliver:

It came out a little taller than I anticipated, but I had jotted down two measurements in my notes and went with the larger one. I must now cross that one out.

 I could look at that piping all day, and I'm not a using a literary device to exaggerate my love. I really think I could. I used it in an almost-exactly-the-same bag last year.

 I pulled up the lining a little bit to do some faux piping for the top edge (I was having a bulk situation) so this was a cute remedy.

 Pockets a'plenty. Each side has three, so there are nine pockets in this bag. I think I'd be so organized I wouldn't know where anything was.

This bag uses a lot of fabric (three yards!), with not much left over. This is how I've made them since I started, but I'm thinking of a slight redesign with the handles. Those handles take a LOT of fabric as they have to be long to run up and down the bag exterior. I don't know that the pocket they're on the side of gets used much so my internal debate is should I nix the straps and the front pocket and have the handles come out of the top of the bag? It would cut some bulk in the bottom seam and save a lot of time and fabric. But I don't know if it would lose some appeal. What do you think?

4 comments:

  1. What a beautiful bag!!!
    xo Kris

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh I know just what you mean, my local fabric shop had reshuffled their quilting section, and although it's not a large area, nothing was where it should be, and yet it looked similar from a distance colour wise, it was totally discombobulating!

    As for the straps, I'd shorten them, they positively eat fabric o.O

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's beautiful. Love the fabrics and I like the straps the way you've done them. If you did them coming out of the top it would look too plain.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Long straps support the body of the bag. On a diaper bag which is used daily, several times a day and goes everywhere with the baby for at least the first year sometimes well into two, that reinforcement means the handles don't tear off! I wouldn't buy or make a bag for that without serious reinforcement. (I have 5 children and I know a good diaper bag. Yours shown above IS one! Don't change a thing!)

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