As I am sure you have gathered, I love to create things ~ easy, hard, simple, intricate ~ whatever it is, I always find a release in creating and designing. One thing I love to do is sew, it's one of those skills that my mom made sure we knew how to do growing up that has turned into a hobby. When I was in high school I designed clothes. The past couple of years the spark for quilting has been rekindled and someone can never have too many bags. For the past couple of years I have been designing patterns for the perfect bag. I have come to find that there is no 'perfect' bag, just a perfect bag for each situation.
I have this small old binder that I have been putting my crocheting patterns in along with templates for quilts and other little nick-knacks. I was just using page protectors to toss everything in if I couldn't put a hole punch in to. It worked out pretty well to hold all those things and keep them in one spot.
The only problem is that everything sinks to the bottom and the binder becomes lopsided.
How I fixed the problem was this. I took those page protectors and sewed pockets into them.
1st Step: take a thin piece of cardboard that fits into the page protector and draw a line on it as to where you want to make the pockets for the lower sections.
2nd Step: Take an exacto and cut along that line. {If you stitch before you cut the extra openings it hard to then cute it without going through the other side.}
3rd Step: When setting up my machine I put the length of the stitch to almost as long as it would go. If the stitches are too close together then as the needle goes through it will end up perferating the page protector and make it easier for it to tear along the stitches.
4th Step: Since the page protector is clear it was easy to look at the guides on my machine. If I was stitching where a cut was I left an 1/8th in seem allowance.
On the one's where I wanted to do a vertical stitch I took a piece of masking tape and placed it further in on the arm as my guide.
5th Step: Back stitching is out of the question, again, because we don't want to perforate the page protector to the point that it tears. I pulled both piece of thread to the back and simply tied them in a knot.
Final Step: Fill and stay organized!!! The binder has tabs that I have used to seperate the different types of mediums {for example crocheting and sewing}. These 'new' page protectors help me to keep my instructions and templates organized with everything else as well!!
I hope you enjoyed the tutorial.
As always ~ with every tutorial, if you like the idea but would rather purchase, leave me a comment. I'll set up a sale on my ETSY shop.
