Cutting Fabric for Sewing A Messenger Bag

Video Transcript

"Now that we've measured the bag, and we know the exact size we wanted--we decided on eighteen inches by thirty inches. Now I'm just going to look at my fabric and decide where I'm going to cut. If you picked out fabric that has a print on it, or maybe a picture on the front of it, or a big flower, you just want to make sure you center that and just catch what you want. Now I'm looking at my fabric, and this is that hemp fabric and it always has little things in it that you don't want to put on the front of your purse. I'm going to try to skip this part. I'm going to go down to this side, and everything looks good over here. Looks good. So I'm going to--and this is real shifty, but I'm just going to go ahead and measure it. I'm going to do eighteen inches, and I have just a twelve-inch ruler, so I'm going to go ahead and mark right here, then go over and catch six more inches for eighteen. And do this one also... got twelve plus six, that's eighteen. This fabric just wants to move all around, but that's okay. It has big grain lines and I'll be able to see if I'm crooked. And the grain lines are--you can see them, how they go straight up and down, and that's just the way the weave is. It goes straight up, and then sideways, so you can see the sideways ones also. We'll go over here and mark this one, and that's six. Okay, now as you can see over here too on the selvage edge, we have a few, just like little marks and holes and stuff, but that's going to be hidden inside the seams, so I'm not worried about those. Let me get over here and mark it again. And this is the width, so now we've got eighteen inches. I'm going to put a few more marks because I want to cut right on top of those marks. Here we go, and this one. And since this fabric is so slinky, I think what I'm going to do is just turn it around and just cut off the eighteen inches wide. Then I'll measure the thirty inches, because it's just--this fabric is moving around a lot. And if your fabric isn't moving around, you can just jump ahead and just do the thirty inches at the same time, but since this one's so shifty, and likes to move around a lot, I'll just ahead and do it like this. Okay. Now, I'm going to go ahead and mark that--the top and all around the back side of the--for the purse. So I need it thirty inches. I'll have to hold it on to the sewing machine a little bit. So here's twelve inches, another twelve inches, and that's twenty-four, so I need six more inches. There we go, there's my mark. Now we're--I think I'm going to do about three marks, three measurements, because it's not that wide. Here we go, so it looks even. You can look at the grain line and tell if it looks even or not. I think that maybe I'll move it over just a little bit. You can tell from this flaw right here in the fabric where that grain line is, and if your fabric is different, you don't have to really worry about being so exact, especially if you have a pattern on your fabric--that really helps out. And there's that, so let me look on here. You can just kind of pull it and tell--yeah, I've got it right on top of the grain line. Now I'm just going to cut this off. Here we go. It's really nice to have a pattern on your fabric; it really helps out with the cutting. There we go. And let's get rid of that. Now, we have the body of the purse, and this is eighteen inches by thirty inches, but when we get finished it's going to be seventeen inches by thirteen inches. So the next step that we're going to do is talk about our strap and figure out what size that we want it to be cut at. So, let's do that next, in the next clip."