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!