Tiny Sewists: Teaching Kids to Sew :: Lesson 8, Project 2

Arden wanted to make a bag for this bear she’s named Carrot.  We sorted through my bins of fabrics and binding and together we chose these three fabrics.  The dog fabric is quite exciting, no?  Some of the ears and puffs on the poodles are sparkly!

We began by measuring Carrot to arrive at the dimensions needed for the bag.  Ours came out to 9″x7″ for the front and 9″x12″ for the back.

I used a quilting ruler and rotary cutter to cut one piece of each dimension from each of the outer and lining fabrics.  I also rough cut pieces of warm n’ natural quilt batting to slightly larger than the fabrics.

I made a quilt sandwich with the batting in between the two fabrics wrong sides together.  I basted a line of stitching all the way around to hold everything together so Arden could concentrate on stitching, not avoiding quilt pins.  You could hand baste, or if you have basting spray this would likely work even better!  Not pictured is that I marked vertical lines every 1″ with a disappearing marking pen for Arden to follow with her stitching.

Now it’s Arden’s turn!  She chose all different fancy stitches on her machine and followed the lines I had drawn.  She even chose a blind hem and overcast stitch.  This was really fun because she got to be in control of the stitches used in her project.  Since we didn’t use a walking foot, there was a little bit of creasing at the bottom edge, but that will get covered up with binding.  I think introducing a walking foot would be a bit much for this beginner project.

Here’s the first piece all finished!  Repeat on the other.

Then I trimmed the batting away and got it pretty close to squared up.  On Thursday, we’ll finish up the project with an easy “cheater” quilt binding appropriate for a young sewist.

Next up: Lesson 9