Drawing an Outline for Handmade Purses

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Melina Peroso and welcome to Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a cute little bag out of regular, everyday fabrics. In this step, we're going to talk about drawing out the shape of our purse. So, what we're going to do is we're going to make a very simple purse, we're not going to make any crazy shape. You can make any shape that you want, but if this is the first you've made a purse, then you want to make a square or rectangle shape. Most likely rectangle, you want to make a rectangle with the longer sides, um, up, like this. Okay, so, if you have a fabric that has a pattern like this one does, you want to kind of plan your bag around the pattern. And we can see that this, this is a beautiful pattern and it would look good along the bottom of the bag. So, what we're going to do is we're going to make this the bottom of our bag. And, we're going to go ahead and flip it over so that the right side is facing down. And we're going to kind of plan out where we want our bag. So, I'm just going to start right from the bottom here, and I'm going to say that I want my bag to be, I'm going to make this a small bag; I'm going to go up to about ten inches. And we're going to use our fabric chalk. If you don't have fabric chalk you can always use a marker, but this is what you should do. So, always keep in mind that we're going to use half an inch all around for a seam allowance. So, since I want to make this a ten inch bag, after I've drawn my ten inch, I'm going to have keep a half an inch at the bottom for hemming and let's check with the design to make sure that will be okay. It's going to be just about right. That means this white part is going to be right at the bottom. And again, every fabric is going to give you a different look, so you have to make sure that when you're drawing out your bag, you're checking to make sure that the designs on the fabric, if any, are going to coincide with the outline that you're cutting. So, half an inch at the bottom is going to be seam allowance, and since we're going to make it a ten inch bag, I'm going to go up to ten and half inches. And if you can, actually, what I'm going to is I'm going to go up to eleven. Ten and half is what you should go up to but I always like to cut a little bit bigger, because you never know, you could mess up, you could, a bunch of things could happen, you could sew it wrong, so I'm going to go up to eleven inches. And then, you're going to go out this way and you're going to draw the other side of the bag. You can make it any shape you want and any size you want. And we're going to go ahead and make this one...let's make it about seven inches. It's going to be a small bag. Okay. I'm going to measure eleven inches. Okay. And then we're going to go across. And now we're going to add the seam allowance. So, since our bag is going to be ten inches and we've already added an inch of seam allowance, we're going to go ahead and just mark it off, so we know. And now we're going to add half an inch all around the edges. You don't have to be, unless you're sewing this for a company or you've got competition or something, you don't really have to measure half an inch. This isn't such a complicated garment that you have to go around and measure half an inch. You can just kind of eyeball-it like this."