Choosing Fabric for Sewing a Shoe Bag

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Candi Cane Canncel With Expert Village. In this clip we're going to make a really fun shoe bag to use for traveling or you can even just use it for storing your shoes if you have really expensive shoes. That you don't want sitting on the shelf or sitting in a box this is a really easy project to make. It also makes a great gift you can use it for little stash bags or any number of things so the first thing that you are going to need is some fabric. You want something that is going to be pretty, soft, silky but you also want something that is going to be durable and washable. If you are using shoes the shoes does get dirty at least the soles will and if you are going to be storing them over time you will want to wash it. So one of my favorite fabrics is a cotton bag satin and mostly satins aren't washable they tend to run a little bit or sometimes it will get water marks. But this particular fabric because it is cotton it is very washable and you can also hand wash it or machine wash, I tend to hand wash things that are very delicate like this. So you want about a yard of fabric then we're going to be making a little casting to actually drawstring our bag together so I'm just using this what is called rat tail. It's such an ugly name for such a pretty trim but it's basically like a corded trim that is covered in satin this is really durable just as durable as a shoe lace but a lot prettier. You can also use ribbon for this or even a shoe lace if you had something that you really liked. So when you are making your bag the first thing you're going to need to consider is the size of your shoes now I have these, they're just vintage tie up lace up shoes. What I just want to do is measure out how long they are and these are a little bit more than 10" long. Then how tall the heal is these are about 3 1/2" so with that basic measurement in mind it gives you an idea how big to cut your bag. So in this case I'm going to do a bag that is about 13" tall by maybe about 7" wide because I want to have enough room in it that both my shoes can fit comfortable together but not to big for cumbersome. So the next clip we will show you how to get this going."