At the end of 2019 a friend was moving house and gave me a couple of boxes of fabrics. Amongst the boxes were fabrics leftover from her wedding dress. I knew immediately I had to make her something special with the fabrics at some point. Roll forward to 2021 when I finally had time to focus on a few non urgent projects I pulled out the fabrics and set to work making the perfect gift. The fabrics I had to work with were lace and shantung. I’d worked with lace a couple times before on small projects but shantung was new to me. I was expecting it to be very slippery but it was actually a very stable fabric.
My friend is the most amazing knitter, she wins prizes in shows. The obvious item to make her would be a project bag for her knitting combining the 2 fabrics. There are so many knitting bag patterns out there but I decided to stick with something I knew and use the McCalls M6338 pattern that I predominantly use for my charity bags but now is my go to bag pattern if I’m looking for one with a drawstring top. I had limited fabrics so it wasn’t the time to try out something new. I did pattern hack it a little changing the handles.
For the outside of the bag and the handles I overlaid the lace on top of the shantung. I did struggle to figure out which was the right side of the lace but after some close inspection I figured it out. The lace had some structure to it and didn’t shift around too much which helped however I did hand tack all the layers together with long stitches prior to assembling each part. For the handles I cut them 16” x 4” They are assembled by folding the rectangle fabric into quarters and top stitching it together before being attached to the bag fronts. I just eyeballed the placement on the bag fronts and ensured that they were roughly in the same spot on each side of the bag.
For the drawstring top section I only used the shantung as I wanted it to be nice and flexible. I was a little short on fabric so lost about 3/4″ on each side of the fold. The benefit of using a TNT (tried and tested) pattern is that you know what it is like to work with and what parts you can modify without it distorting the finished item. The drawstring section is very generous in size so you didn’t really notice the loss of fabric as there was still plenty there to close it up. The drawstrings were also made with just the shantung.
I was really pleased with this bag. My friend loved it when I posted it up to her. I’m glad I was able to use her special fabrics to make a meaningful gift for her.
Cassiy
stitchnsewcreates 