Wednesday 18 February 2015

A straight zippered pouch corner.

I am talking about this:


A few years ago, I bought this toiletry bag at Liberty's in London.

 
 


This represents the perfect zippered pouch for me.

At first, when I started sewing bags myself; I got frustrated,  as I could never achieve this perfect, neat result. In the end I got there , but it took time.
If you look around on etsy and type: "zippered pouch" , you will see that a lot of the bags that come up don't have the neat, professional finish I want. I would never buy those bags.
These days, you can find many tutorials for zippered pouches; but there are only a few I am happy with.
The best tutorial I found so far is the pleated make-up bag with covered zip ends  tutorial from Flossie Teacakes.

I wanted to guide you through my version of this zippered pouch and will focus mainly on "the corner".
First, the zipper. I always use a zipper which is a little bit shorter than the lenght of the fabric piece; I don't want to cut or stitch through the actual zipper teeth.

 
 

 
 
I cut the zip ends down
to have an equal distance between the end of the zipper and the end of the fabrics (1 cm) 
 
 
 Here, I already attached the zip end covers.
 

 
The "sandwich" of the outer fabric, zipper and lining.
 

A sewn sandwich from end to end.
 


The outer fabric and lining are flipped over and lay wrong side to wrong side and are topstitched.
 

 
The other half is attached in the same way.
 
To finish your pouch, OPEN YOUR ZIPPER( or you won't be able to turn your finished pouch inside out), place the outer fabrics so that they are laying right side to right side; do the same with the lining pieces.
"The important thing here is that you don’t want to trap the ends of your zip covers in your stitching, but equally you want to sew near enough to them that there is barely a gap between the zip covers and the side seams on the finished item"
 

Once turned over, you can't see the zip covers anymore, so I put a needle at their edge. The marking a bit more outwards will be my stitching line.
 
 A final, very important thing to do is debulking: I generously cut out a triangle (black lines in the above picture) without touching the stitches. This will make it much easier to make your straight corner , once the pouch is turned inside out.
Here is the final result:




Do you have another solution for this pouchy problem? Let me know.
Warm regards
Kristien
 



2 comments:

  1. I am so with you. I do not like those dented corners on pouches and it's very hard to find tutorials for straight ones. I think I have conquered it though through much trial and error.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't like the tabs, they don't look pretty and mean the bag doesn't open wide enough. I prefer the bags to be without them. There are solutions to the problem without zip covers.

    ReplyDelete

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