With sunglasses in - side view

After having bought my friend a bag sewing book for her birthday, I’d decided I should buy me one too. After a bit of research, and some reading of kindle samples, I bought the Sew What! Bags book as I liked the idea of it being an ideas book, with instructions on how to adapt each of the bags so that it suits my own needs rather than a strict follow the pattern book (another friend bought me Sew! a few weeks ago and that it very pattern focussed so I thought an alternative would be good).

After a run in last night between my dog and another dog in a local park, I’d slipped in to over-analysis mode, and figured I’d try sewing as a way to bring myself out of that and give myself something positive to focus on. So I decided to start at the beginning of the book and make the simplest thing in the book — a glasses case.

I improvised the instructions a bit, using a combination of those in the book, with the assembly method used for the previous drawstring bags choosing to stitch the outer and inner all together into one long strip of fabric, rather than the books method of making an outer and an inner and then attaching them together.

With sunglasses in - top down

For the outer fabric I used one of the squares of fabric I’d got from deckchairstripes and for the inner fabric I used some beach hut fabric that I had in my stash. I decided to use the button fastening as per the book’s suggestion and so used one of the buttons amongst a bag that my friend bought me for my birthday and then trimmed the beach hut fabric down to get a whole beach hut as the fastening tab. I had wondered how well my little sewing machine would cope with the deckchair fabric, but it worked like a dream and was a really nice fabric to work with — and it could handle the odd unstitching really nicely too!

It took me under two hours from start to finish, including choosing the fabrics. What is really brilliant though, is that was all done from supplies I already had in my craft cupboard. Really rather pleased with myself, and it worked brilliantly at taking my mind off dog related troubles.