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Friday, June 1, 2012

Fabulous Free Pattern Friday

Ladies Who Lunch Bag

 Today's post is all about taking a placemat and turning it into an incredible bag.
You can begin with any rectangular placemat. Mine is this wonderful wooden piece. The disks are round and flat. The principles that I used for this bag can be translated to any rectangular placemat. 
It's a very economical bag to make. This placemat only cost as you see, $5.99. Great buy.
I had the black wooden handles. The beads I purchased, but they were a good deal as well.
The interior fabric was some I had. It's a twill.
All of the pieces.
Begin by shaping the placemat in the shape you would like and place it on a piece of muslin so you can trace this for the sides of your bag..
The pattern piece for the side of my bag.
Using the placemat as my guide, I cut out 2 rectangles for my bag. I will need an outside piece and an inside piece.
Sew the side panels to the rectangles. You will have two bags that you will sew together. Make sure to leave an opening in the side of one so that you can turn once sewn together.
The interior of the bag.
In order for the bag to fold in on the sides, you will need to sew a pleat into the side panels. Do this by folding them in half and stitching down the panel about 2" to 3".
You can see my pleat in the side panel in the picture above.
In the above picture you can see how nicely the bag will fold in on the sides once the stitching has been done for the pleat. 
Now sew the interior bag to the placemat. Since my placemat had a space between the black discs, I added a bead in between each disk as I sewed the interior bag to the placemat.
I did not sew the sides to the placemat.
As you can see in the above picture, the placemat lays nicely against the interior bag without sewing the sides together.
I added a magnetic snap to the interior of my bag.
It holds the bag together very well
Since my placemat is wooden and my handles are also wooden, I used Super Glue to glue the handles to the bag. For the feet, I drilled holes into the disks and used my beads to create the feet. Looks great, but very easy to do.
For this bag, I used exactly the same principles as I used for the black bag, but I added tabs for the handles which were sewn into the interior bag.
So there you have it, an incredibly easy bag to make and no one will believe that it is a placemat.
Enjoy the start of your weekend!



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17 comments:

  1. Way too cute! your choices of placemats and accessories is perfect.

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  2. These are gorgeous!! Thanks for the tutorial. I'm keeping my eye out for some nice placemats.

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  3. Wow! These are fabulous! Thanks for the inspiration.

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  4. Love it!! So stylish. Thanks for the awesome post!

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  5. Have put a link to your site on my business Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Contemporary-Fashion-Education-Inc/151215644907805?v=wall&ref=ts

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  6. Thank you for this tutorial, very cool, and I am going to start one today!!!.....Anna

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  7. How are the handles attached? I might have missed something.

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    1. Hi Gail, I attached the handles with a gel based Super Glue. The handles as well as the placemat are wood, so the super glue worked really well.

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  8. Great looking bags. I got to see the black one in person Saturday. Absolutely beautiful.

    Thanks for the tutorial!
    C

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  9. Love these. Not made a bag for ages. Get so much satisfaction from making one, despite moaning all the way through lol.

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  10. Got a BIG birthday outfit planned so I'm making one today!!! This is AWESOME!! Can't wait to shop for the stuff!!! Thanks for the tut!!!

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  11. Great idea! Bags are fantastic!

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  12. love these definitely going have a go. Thanks for the tutorial.

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  13. Ooooh, I love this bag! I'm going to look at placemats in a whole new way... :)

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Sandra. I have a bunch of placemats that I would like to put together, so I think I might do an entire series of placemat bags. There are so many great placemats out there and the possibilities are truly endless.

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