 Hey guys, Cindy Eder here with my artsy endeavors. How are you doing today? I'm doing fantastic. We have a surprise for you this week. Um, we, this is what's called a creative well-being bag. And the kind of the story behind this is, you know how, um, at least the girls, I don't know about the guys, but we always have something in our purses that has either a little doodad in it or maybe it's a couple pictures that, you know, we look at or, um, you know, maybe little tokens, little stones, little, um, carved stones, whatever the case may be that we may put into these bags. And it's just kind of like a good luck, kind of like a relief, um, just enjoy type of bag. Okay. We have actually done a project for you guys. Um, this has been in the works, um, I believe since December. And what we did is we created a creative well-being bag. Now each one of the teachers, myself, Gina, Ann, Ian and Lisa, we have each done a project. Now I'm not going to show you everything, but I'm going to give you a little peek. First of all, we have the bag. I'm just going to get a little peek of stuff inside. See the stuff's inside? All right. So I'm going to give you, because what's going to happen now is every one of the teachers is going to come out with their videos and we're going to show you what we made and what we have. You know, at the end, we're going to, everybody's going to show you what we have in our bags. So I hope you guys enjoy this. Have fun. Here comes Gina. Hey guys, welcome to another video for my creative year. For those of you who don't know, my creative year is a Facebook group, an online mixed media art group. It's free. The materials list, your copy of the pattern for today's project, and a whole bunch more stuff is over in the Facebook group. So if you want this and you want to make one of these, join the group. The link is in the description below and there. It is a free year-long group. It is a teaching group. It's a collaborative group. It is a sharing group all about exploring our creative side for the year of 2018. So we are working on a special six-part project today. I am doing part one and it is called a creative well-being bag. I am making the bags because I think I'm the only one of the team that knows how to sew. So anyway, that's okay. So I drafted a pattern based on an actual bag that I carry. The finished bag will end up being around four by six-ish, maybe a little bit more. It's basically just two patterns. These two, you'll need two of this bigger one and you want to cut it on the fold so that after you cut it, you get a rectangle like this. Now I have some of my custom printed fabric from Spoonflower. I do design fabrics for those of you who don't know and you can buy them at Spoonflower.com. The link is in the description below too at my direct store. Anyway, I have five different patterns I happened to have pieces of in my stash. So I cut five of the rectangles, one out of each of the different kinds of fabric. There we go. And you'll need, like I said, you'll need one of these. You'll need two of these, one of these in your printed fabric for the outside. You're going to cut it on a fold here on one of these long sides so that when you are done cutting it and you open it, you have a rectangle. Then you're going to need one of the same piece in a lining fabric. So I chose this kind of plain white fabric and you probably can't tell but there's a little bit of a leaf pattern in the fabric. It's very faint. It's really just a white on white print. Then for each bag, you're going to need one of these rectangle, again cut on the fold so that when you cut it, you get this piece here like that. You'll need one of these for each bag that you're going to make. You'll also need some Velcro and a couple other things. Like I said, the materials list will be over in the Facebook group as well as a free copy of the pattern that you'll be able to download. The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to do some pressing. So I'm going to start with the outside pieces and I am going to put this aside. I've got some spray starch here. When I'm working with fabric, I like to use this to get nice clean, crisp presses on my fabric. This happens to be Mary Ellen's Best Press. It is a lavender scented spray starch and it only gets used when I do this because when my husband presses his shirts, he doesn't like them smelling like flowers. I don't know why. Is it not very hot? Nope. We need to get that to be hot. Alright, so let me turn that on and let me get it hot and I'll be right back. I don't know what was wrong with the other iron. It wasn't me. It wasn't the iron. So I went and grabbed my husband's shirt iron. Nobody tell him okay. And yes, we have his and hers irons because mine tends to have painy, icky messes on it. He doesn't want that on his dress shirts. I don't understand why. Anyway, okay. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to press the fabric flat or at least as flat as we can get it. Some of these pieces are pretty wrinkly. So I want to press it pretty flat first. It's much better. Then I'm going to fold it up so the two short ends meet and I'm going to press it again. Okay, I'm going to do that to all of the long rectangles so that we have that nice crease in the middle. And then on the short or I should say smaller rectangles, we are going to spray it again and press it flat. This is the cotton. It's pretty wrinkly. And then we're going to fold it in half so that the right side of your fabric lining fabric, if it has the right side is facing out and the wrong sides are together. And then we're going to press it flat. Okay, so we're going to do that to all of our pieces. The little ones like this, the bigger ones like this. All right, I'm going to do that and I'll be right back. All right, now that everything's ironed, I'm going to separate out my pieces with these long skinny ones. I've got the lining. I've got the outside. And you may only just be making one bag for yourself so you won't have to do this part. All right, so we're going to set the outside aside for a second. We're going to take our lining pieces and on one half of the fold we are going to take, and I'm going to take and put my label. I'm going to just eyeball it. You can measure it. I'm going to center it from side to side and I'm going to put it about an inch to an inch and a half down from the cut edge. And I'm going to sew all the way around. So I'm going to do all five of them and I'll be back. Just use a plain straight stitch, by the way, nothing fancy. Just make sure you go back and forth at the beginning and the end. So you just saw a little clip of me sewing the tags on. You'll notice I did all five bags at once without clipping any threads in between. And then after I was done and they were all kind of hooked together with the threads then I clipped all the threads nice and neat and clean. So on the one end we have our label here on the inside which you don't have to add. Maybe you want to just put a little piece of fabric with an inspirational word on the inside or something like that. But anytime I make anything for anybody I put a label inside. Now we have our long skinny piece and the first thing we're going to do is we are going to just press fold it into thirds and then just finger, finger fold it. We just want to leave a little bit of a mark on the fabric, a guideline, which I don't know if you're going to be, I guess yeah, I guess you can see that on there. Okay, then we're going to take this and we're going to lay it, I have a pencil mark on here so I want that to end up being covered up. It's about an inch, the cut edge of this piece is going to be about an inch up from the fold mark on our fabric that we pressed into our fabric before when we did that before. So we have the press right here and about an inch above that I'm going to put the cut line here. I'm going to sew along this cut edge about an eighth of an inch in or the width of the presser foot. I'm going to line the presser foot up with this cut edge of this fabric and then I'm going to flip this up and then I'm going to sew along those folds that I just made here and that's going to create some pockets on the inside of our bag. Isn't that happy? And as I'm looking at this, I want to do it a little higher so I'm going to do about an inch and a half. So it's good to, yeah, do it about an inch and a half. It's good to not have it too close to that fold, okay? So I'm going to do that and I'll be right back. Like before, I just kept going. So now I'm going to go back. I'm going to clip all the threads and clean everything up and you're going to be left with a piece that looks like this and this is going to be the inside of our bag. So I'm going to do that and then we're going to move on to the outside. All right, I'll be right back. Okay, for the outside, I have the idea to add some of these. These are billboard vinyl scraps from my friend Shannon Green's Etsy shop. She uses the billboard vinyl and repurposes it to make journal covers. I have a bunch of it here and I have the idea to repurpose it to add like a little sort of a, I guess you'd call it a blank label on the outside of the little bag and because this is billboard vinyl, the recipient could write on this, paint on this, collage on this billboard vinyl if they want, but a lot of these people, these pieces have some sort of random, painting like decoration and color from the original billboard vinyl sign on them and I just thought it might be, it might add something interesting to the bag. So I'm just sort of going to whack off a rectangle. I think I want to use this green one on this green bag and then I'm going to need another little piece of vinyl about maybe a little longer than that. That one might be too short. Let's just cut that again. So I'm going to need another little long skinny piece of vinyl because we're going to put a loop on the outside of our bag. So that's going to be for the green bag. So I'm going to just stitch this, this billboard vinyl according to my friend Shannon, we'll find out if she's right in a minute, stitches really easily on your regular sewing machine. So again, like the other label on the inside, I'm going to eyeball it from side to side and about an inch and a half or so down from the top. I'm going to hold it in place and I'm going to straight stitch all the way around the edge with my thread. So let's see if this works. It stitches beautifully, I have to say. So I'm going to add a label to each one of the outsides and while I'm doing it, I'm going to cut a loop for each one too and I'm going to do that and I'll be right back. Okay, I have to say the bags aren't even done yet. Although this one is a little bit crooked, that's okay. I love the way it looks. This is crooked because I didn't pin it or anything. So if you really want it to be really straight, then you need to pin it. But how cute is this? I love the little piece of vinyl on here. I think that's so cute. Okay. So the next thing we're going to do is we are going to take our outsides and we are going to refold them so they are right sides together and we're going to sew down the short sides. We're also going to take the lining pieces and do the same thing, fold them so this and the label are together on the inside and then we're going to sew them down the short edges. So I'm going to do all 10 of the pieces that way and I'll be right back. Okay, we're going to change the camera angle here because I think it's going to be easier for you all to understand what I'm going to do next if I leave the camera angle the way it is right now. So the next thing you want to do, now we have this little like sack, right? So the next thing you want to do is take this little point here and we're going to take the sewn edge and we're going to push it down flat with the pressed crease at the bottom that we made along the middle of the rectangle to begin with. We have a shape like this. We're going to sew across here. On my sewing machine bed, I'm putting the corner of where this corner here where the fold is, this corner. On the number two, I've got markings on my sewing machine bed so I'm going to put it on number two and then I'm going to sew straight across making sure I go back and forth and then I'm going to do them all that way. All the insides and all the outsides. Like before, I'm not going to pull that one out and cut the threads. I'm just going to go ahead and keep sewing, push it back and do one after the other and do sort of an assembly line sewing and it doesn't have to be perfect. If it is, you want to make sure you use a pin to mark it and poke it through so you've got it lined up well but it doesn't have to be perfect. These are some little bags. I used to make these kind of little bags. I made them a little bit digger all the time when I did shows. They did pretty well. You can make them out of scraps so you can really do them out of just about anything. Okay, so I'm going to do them all that way and I'll be right back. Okay, we forgot to put these in. Oops. So I'm going to take all of the outsides that we just did and I'm going to take them with the part where we sewed our label facing me and I'm going to look at the left side and about the same height as where the label is. I'm going to pop open a couple of stitches. I'm going to take the matching piece of vinyl to the label that's here on the outside, which is this one. I'm going to fold it with the same color out because it's got a different color on the inside. Fold it in half. I'm going to put it there where I popped the seam open so that it's like that. If you look on the inside, you have a little loop, which is what we want. We're going to put a little loop there. You want to know exactly why we're putting a loop there until you see one of the later videos, but just trust me, put a loop there. One of the things I will tell you if you're doing something like this with the vinyl on it, I have a denim needle on this machine, which is a really strong, thick needle. I do recommend that you use something like that. When you get it done, if you turn it right side out, because this is the wrong side, the little corners that we just sewed make a nice flat bottom to your bag. You have a cute look at that with the little loop on the side. We're going to fix all of them, and then I will match them each up with a piece of lining, and I'll show you how we're going to finish these. I'll be right back. Once you have your outside of your bag looking like this, you want to take it and you want to take your lining piece, and you want your label, the label here that you put in, to be on the opposite side of this one. What do I mean by that? I'm going to put wrong sides together. I'm going to match up the side seams. Here, when I look at the bag, I see this label, and when I open the bag, I see the other label. Then we are going to, and I've done them all that way. They're all matched up. Then after we get all that done, we need some elastic. I mean elastic. What is this? Velcro. Not elastic. I grabbed some elastic from my stash. Elastic. I keep calling it, it's Velcro. You'll need about a six inch long piece for each bag. I need five of those. I'm going to cut it just under the six inches. You could do it with a smaller piece of elastic, but I think it will do the full width. Sometimes I split the elastic in half this way when I'm doing these, but I think we're going to use the full width without splitting it. Did I say elastic again? Jesus Christ, I mean Velcro. I shouldn't have said that. I don't mean to take the Lord's name in vain. Sorry, you guys. We're going to take one of our pairs of Velcro. See, I said Velcro, not elastic this time. One of our bags. I'm going to pull this in half. I'm going to start with the soft side. I'm going to start at the side seam with a loop. I'm going to sew the elastic Velcro. Oh my goodness. I'm going to sew this so it's about the cut edge of the bag is about at the halfway mark here of the Velcro. Do you see that? So the width wise. I'm going to do that all the way. I'm going to sew this one on. I've cut these just a little bit short. So here's the side seam. So I'm going to start it about down there, making sure I pull the other side of the fabric, the bag out. So I'm only sewing through the one half of the bag and not through both halves of the bag. I don't want to be sewing it shut. When I have to stop and move the fabric, I'm going to stop with a needle in the down position. When I get close to the other seam, I'm going to grab the other half of the elastic. This one is soft side up. This one is rough side up. There's lots of different ways you could do this. If you're experienced with sewing, of course you could put a zipper in there. You could hem these upper raw edges. I'm not going to do that. There's a lot of different ways you could do this. Velcro I think is pretty easy. Okay, once you get back to the place that you started, cut your threads and you'll have something that looks like that. Okay, we're going to fold this down like that. So you have a little bit of the fabric sticking up, not too much. And we're going to go all the way around again. And we're going to sew about where we did the first time. This time try to keep it pretty straight because it's going to show on the outside of the bag. Again, if you have to stop, make sure your needle is down. If you have to stop and pull and adjust your fabric, that'll keep things pretty straight. Before I get too far over here, back to the beginning, I'm going to trim these threads off. Go back and forth. Trim your threads. Adjust the lining if it needs it a little bit. And you have a bag with a closure. So we've got a finished bag here. It's got this cute little label on the outside, a loop here. When you open it, it's got, now let's see if I can see it. You've got the three pockets. You have three, that little flap we put on the inside made little pockets. You've got the label. Yeah, cute little bag. So I'm going to make five of these and I'll be back when I've got them all done. So there we go. They are all done. Creative Well-Being Bag. So it's a cute little fun little bag whether you make it a little bigger to hold pencils or you use it what we're going to use it for, which I'm not going to tell you. You have to watch all six parts. Whatever you choose to use it for, it's a fun little bag. Like I said, I used to make a lot of these and sell them at shows. I actually carried one of these around for years with a small cross stitch project in it and I used to put my spare needles in the little pockets and things like that. So they're good for a lot of things before you gift them or sell them or use them, double check them after you think you're done and make sure there's no threads that need clipping or anything like that. These all look pretty good. And I have to say, I love the addition of the billboard vinyl. How cute is that? These were just scraps. Shannon does of course make things with these but she also sells the bags of scraps and so I love that and I love the little flat bottom on the bag. There you have it. I hope it gives you some ideas of what you can do. If you would like to join the My Creative Year Facebook group, the link is in the description. If you'd like the complete materials list with links to products and sites and all of that stuff, it's in the Facebook group. I'll include a few store links like Spoonflower here on YouTube and actually, I don't actually even need to do that. If you go to the video description, there's a link down there that says Link Tree. If you click on that, that's every single place I am on the internet, including Spoonflower where my fabric is from. And Shannon Green is here on YouTube. If you don't know who she is, I'd be surprised. She's a pretty big YouTuber, a friend of mine and she's very talented. Anyway, I will try to remember to link her things but for a complete materials list, go to Facebook. If you want to share your ideas about the bags, maybe you have alternatives to the bag that you want to, maybe you've got a great pattern that would work, share it over in the Facebook group. That's it for today. Don't forget the most important thing. Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye, guys.