Measuring The Strap for Sewing A Messenger Bag

Video Transcript

"So, now we're ready to attach this strap that we made earlier to the body of this messenger bag. And let's go ahead and just look at the bag, and see where we want to put the strap. And if you'll remember earlier, when I folded this messenger bag body over I put the right sides, bottoms together, seam to seam, next to each other and I made a mark. You can still see it there; I'll put it there again. It's just where they meet.... their at the same distance from the bottom to the top and that's thirteen inches. So that's where we want to sew the strap onto the body of the purse. But now we need to measure the strap itself, because my friend wants it thirty-seven inches. So, what I'm going to do before I even put this on is measure thirty seven inches out. But if you'll remember, I gave myself about an inch, maybe a little bit more, at the end. So I'm going to make a mark, just anywhere, it doesn't really matter. We haven't measured it yet, so it's okay. Just make a mark and here I'm going to measure thirty-seven inches. So I'm going to use the ruler on the front of my sewing machine, and I'm going to do thirty-seven inches. And I've determined that right here is where thirty-seven inches is. I'm just going to make a mark right there. And I'm not going to worry about this excess because I'm going to cut that after I sew it. So when I get the body of the messenger bag, I'm going to open it up a little bit. This is the side seam. I'm going to put the seam for the strap on the inside of the purse so that when you sew it on, it's going to look like this. You're not going to have the seam on the outside, you're going to have the seam on the inside. And I'm going to do a little pinning before I even sew it on. I'm going to put the seam matching the seam, but I also want the mark that I made up here on the mark that measures thirteen inches from the bottom of the bag. So I'm just going to put fingernail against fingernail, and can tell that it's matching right there with the seams matching in the middle. Okay, I'm going to get a couple of straight pins that I have... let me grab a few of these... and I'm just going to put a pin on each side of the strap. And this is a good way to look at it and see if I have it straight. I can see this that marks thirteen inches from the bottom to the top of the purse. I can see this which marks thirty-seven inches; and it's a little off, so I'm going to move it just a tiny bit up, and re-pin it. And this one I'm going to move it up a little bit too. So now we can see that it matches right up. And let's do that to the other side too. What we want to do is hold this, make sure you don't twist it, because sometimes if it gets twisted like this, your strap won't be straight. So just hold it, make sure it's straight. Let's go to the other side and do the exact same thing. Let's just lay it right there on top, and let's lay it out and look at it. So I want this seam to match these, to lay right on top of that one... the seams to match. So let me just lay it right there on top. I'm going to put a in right here. And this one's trying to move around, but you just hold it straight and if you've got it measured wrong you can just remeasure it and re pin it. I'll grab this pin....and there we go and let's lay this out and see if we got it right. Okay, we do. I can see that we do. This mark matches up with these marks. And what we're going to do in the next clip is I'm going to show you how to sew this down and I'm going to show you how to anchor it all and so we don't have to worry about it having too much in it and pulling the thread apart. So we'll do that in the next clip."