Hello!
Welcome to a brand new episode of Make, Thrift, Buy, the show where you guys send in cool
things you found on the internet and then I do my best to recreate them!
So first off – show of hands if you love puns.
GUYS.
Today’s challenge, sent to me by Norie, is probably one of my favourite Make Thrift
Buy suggestions so far.
It’s a HAND.
BAG.
A hand.
Bag.
Get it?
The whole item is a pun.
It’s so beautiful.
The original design comes from a Japanese brand called MerryJenny from a year-old collection
– so unless you live in Japan, and time-travel back a year ago, or you buy a cheap wholesale
knockoff of this bag – which, actually no, not even that’s available anymore – well,
this item is pretty much impossible to get your hands on.
Luckily, I’m pretty handy when it comes to DIY, so I'm pretty sure we can make this
for ourselves.
Fingers crossed we nail it!
This, and more puns, await you in this tutorial.
So let’s get started.
So before we start I just want to say, I did pretty much everything about this project
pretty much backwards, and for that reason
it took me two frickken DAYS to complete,
but if you do this project in a much more logical way than I did then it will probably
take you about 3-4 hours.
Just do as I say, not as I do.
Anyway with that said, the first thing I did was to collect up my fabrics.
Both fabrics are woven (which means, non-stretchy) cottons which are mid-to-heavy weight – like
linen consistency.
The black cotton will make up the bag portion of the tote, and this purpley-pink fabric
will make up the straps and the hands of the bag.
The first thing that I did was to cut 3 rectangles out of my fabrics.
The two straps are both 42 inches long and 6 inches wide.
I wanted these to be LONGER than the length of the straps on the original bag, because
I like my tote bags to have longer straps.
The bag fabric is 36 inches long and 16 inches wide.
So first, I’m going to make a simple tote bag.
To do this, I folded the bag fabric in half length-ways, put pins through both layers
to hold them together, and then I sewed down the sides like this.
Next, with the bag still inside-out, I’m going to “box” the two bottom corners.
To do this, first I cut away some of the excess fabric at the seam, about 2 inches worth,
and then I pulled the corner out like this, and then I folded this bottom corner so that
the side seam ends up right in the middle of the corner.
Then, I drew a straight line 2 inches up from the corner point to make a triangle.
Then, I sewed straight across here.
After this corner was sewn, I chopped off the corner close to the stitches, repeated
this on the other side, and I ended up with this.
The bottom of the bag will now look really nice when it’s turned the right way around.
While the bag was still inside out, I folded the top down about 1 and a half inches, and
then I sewed all the way around the top, to make a hem.
To make the straps, I laid each one on my ironing-board, and first I folded them like
this, bringing the edges in to meet at the centre.
I ironed these folds in place, all the way down the length of the strap.
Then, I folded THIS in half, and then I ironed the whole strap flat.
And then I repeated this for the other strap.
Now unfortunately, I didn’t have a thread that matched the colour of my fabric, so I
chose this pale grey as a nice, subtle contrast.
Then, I folded down the end of each strap like this, and I sewed a box shape down the
end, and then I sewed down both sides of each strap like this.
And this is what each finished strap looks like.
Next, I placed the straps approximately where I wanted them to go on the bag, but I didn’t
sew them on yet.
And this is the point where I started doing EVERYTHING backwards – because I decided
that I would try and sew the hands directly onto the bag itself, which I later realised
was not the best thing to do.
Anyway, to get the right size for each of the hands, I lined up this fabric underneath
the strap, and I drew a hand shape on to it with chalk.
Then I folded this fabric over on itself once, and then twice, so that there were a total
of 4 layers of fabric underneath.
I stuck some pins into the hand shape to stop the fabric from moving, and then I cut out
all 4 hands at once.
SO, this is the bit you hands-down SHOULD NOT follow.
I sewed the hands down directly onto my tote bag in the positions that I wanted them, BUT
you should just sew them directly onto iron-on patches – they’re these guys – instead.
All the sewing still happens in the same way as I do here, so I’ll show you how I sewed
up the hands, but I highly recommend, from my own firsthand experience, that you either
sew these onto scrap fabric or iron on patches, and NOT directly on to the tote bag.
So, I attached each hand to the fabric underneath by first throwing it into an embroidery hoop
– and this is totally optional, I just wanted to keep the fabric underneath taut – and
then using a very short zig-zag stitch - here is me reducing the length of my zig-zag stitch
to basically nothing - I went around the edges of each hand like this.
So that gave me this.
Then, I stitched on the fingernails on in a similar way, using a wide zig zag stitch
in contrasting colours – I used purple and red for the nailpolish -
And this is where we really ran into trouble, because the repeated zig-zag stitching caused
the fabric to pinch and bunch up around the edges of the hand applique, which I didn't
think looked particularly good.
So I decided to scrap this bag, but I saved the hands on it and turned them into PATCHES
– and I basically made this patches exactly in the same way as I did
in my alien t-shirt DIY.
So first, I grabbed my fabric glue and I painted a thin line of glue around the edges, close
to the stitches.
This will stop the fabric from fraying when I cut them out.
And then, I cut the hands out of the fabric, really close to those zig-zag stitches.
I then placed each hand down on top of an iron-on patch – It was a LITTLE bit too
small for the patch, but I made it work – and I sewed them on to the patches right around
the edges.
Then I cut all of this out, around the hand’s outline – and I’ve got myself a hand patch.
I repeated this for all the others to give myself 4 hand patches.
You gotta hand it to me - I improvised pretty well there.
So then, I started the tote again from scratch – BUT FIRST, I’m going to apply the hands
up both ends like this, each matching pair about 2 and a half inches away from the top
edge of the fabric, by ironing them on.
And once they were ironed on, I made the bag exactly in the same way as I did the first
time around – folded it in half, sewed down the sides, boxed the corners, sewed a hem
around the top, and I’ve now got a bag with hands on it, and all I have to do is to sew
on the straps.
I attached each strap to one pair of matching hands, like this, sewing them on using two
lines of straight stitches here and here.
After repeating this on the other side I now have a hand bag.
So, how does it look?
How did I go?
(Music plays)
I LOVE how this turned out.
This is my new favourite shopping bag, my new favourite pool bag – I love it.
I’m probably going to add a small pocket on the inside as well, might even do a lined
version – but because this was the first ever tote bag I'd ever made, I wanted to start
with the basics.
We can get fancy later on.
Anyway, my conclusion is: (scissor-snipping sound effect)
THUMBS UP if you liked this tutorial!
This bag is pretty cute(ical), don't you think!
Hey no wait!
Camera, no wait!
No, I'm sorry, I'll stop making hand puns!
Camera, wait!
No!
Come on, lend me a hand!
(scary music plays)
Wait no, I mean I didn't - I didn't mean to make another hand pun -
I'm sorry!
Um, oh man.
This has gotten TOTALLY out of hand!
No, wait, no!
[THUD] (Silence)
In all seriousness, if you liked this video, and you like the content that I produce, consider
helping to support this community by going to patreon.com/annikavictoria.
Any amount, even $1 per video - even $1 per month! - helps out a TONNE.
This studio space that I'm filming in right now?
Wouldn’t be possible without my Patreon fam.
In fact, nothing would even be filming right now, because the lens of my camera was supported
by my Patreon patrons when my old one broke.
So a BIG shout out to my Patreon family for helping to make this video possible.
So, I'll see you on my Patreon page - you can click here OR visit the link in
the description.
Bye guys!