Hi, and welcome to day 7 of the Whole Lotta Bag Along!

This week we’re moving on to the lining, and this is where the regular bag and the baby changing bag diverge, so I have 2 sets of tips for you today.

For The Regular Option

For the zipped pocket, you’re going to be doing exactly as it says in the pattern, however, there’s a couple of things I’d like to share with you that I hope will help.

1.  When you sew round the rectangle, start and end in the middle of a long side, that saves you from getting bulkier seams at one of the corners:

2. When you come to cutting the opening, there’s an issue I regularly see people have.  Look at the picture below.  Not too bad on the white, which is being the bag lining here, but you can see the pocket fabric curling round, and it’s gone a bit wavy at the edges:

Now flip it over – eek!  Serious wrinkles and distortion that an iron will not get out, and if you try to add the pocket lining, well, it would be fair to say the sides won’t match any more!

Let me show you what caused this.  If you look in the photo below, you can see in the circled bits that the cuts I made don’t go right out to the end of the stitching:

That’s your problem right there.  When you turn it through, it’s fighting against itself, so even if you manage to wrestle it to get the lining looking neat, the pocket will look a total mess, as it’s effectively lost the battle and been twisted out of shape.

If on the other hand you get some very sharp, pointed scissors and snip right out to the corner as in the photo below:

And then you turn it through again and press – hey presto, it looks neat and tidy and not distorted!  (Excuse a couple of wrinkles, by doing it wrong first, I was never going to get it perfect!)

For The Changing Bag Option

Now we’re getting to the serious sewing with laminates bit, and I’ll do a whole post tomorrow on how best to sew with them, but here’s the instructions you will need to make your pockets.

1. The flat pocket.

• Take your 12″ by 16″ piece, and fold it in half, wrong sides together, matching the long edges.
• Top stitch along the fold about 1/8″ from the edge
• Baste it onto one of the O2 laminate pieces at the sides only, matching the side and bottom edges
• Draw a line down the centre, and top stitch down it
• Baste the bottom edge

2. The bellows pocket:

• Take your 12″ by 22″ piece, and fold it in half, wrong sides together, matching the long edges.
• Top stitch along the fold about 1/8″ from the edge
• Follow the instructions for the outer bellows pocket, its exactly the same!

Note: When I press the folds, I like to hold them in place with Wonder Clips, as laminate is rather springy

Note that the final bit may have small gaps between the folds – this is because the laminate is chunkier than doing this with quilting cotton, or even home dec weight fabrics.

I hope all of this makes sense, but if you have a question, please let me know :o)