Sew Pink 2025 - Take Two

I was taking part in #SewPink again this year, which is the annual cancer awareness blog hop hosted by ByAnnie. You can read all about it here in the post from the blog hop.

The team at ByAnnie always supplies the materials, if we need them, to make a project, and I've taken the opportunity both last year and this year to work on my bag making skills. I'm not a very prolific bag maker, so having patterns that are easy to follow are very important, and ByAnnie patterns definitely are that. It also helps that a lot of her patterns come with video tutorials for the important steps, and I am always making full use of those.

Coaster Tutorial as a stand-in

This year, I was planning on making the Project Bags 2.0, using a sample block from my Rays Of Love pattern for the back.

Unfortunately, Canada Post went on strike just as my supplies were in the mail to me, and they didn't make it in time for the blog hop. I wrote a tutorial for a fun little set of scrappy coasters that went on the blog hop instead, but once the materials for the Project Bags arrived, I really didn't want to leave them sitting around.

Project Bag 2.0 pattern from byAnnie

So, here's my Project Bag 2.0, for #SewPink2025, take 2.

I made the medium sized bag, because my quilt block was 12"x12" and that fit perfectly with the size of the medium bag. I did add a little extra background fabric all the way around before quilting it to the Soft&Stable, because it has a tendency to shrink a bit with quilting and I didn't want to risk it being too small in the end.

I had decided on highlighting childhood cancer with my project this year, which is why I picked this Rays of Love block with the yellow heart. The colour scheme for the bag was pretty easy to land on from that. With the block being yellow on navy, I just expanded that as my colour scheme for the whole bag. So we have a navy backing to the block, a yellow pieced border, and yellow zipper strips and binding. 

For the quilting, I decided to go bold and use a heavier weight yellow thread in the bobbin that would show off on the navy backing, which is visible through the vinyl window. I outlined the heart, echo-quilted around it, and also outlined the rays by stitching in the ditch along all the seams of the heart. I thought this would add a little bit of interest to the bag inside, without taking away from the border. 

This was my first time working with vinyl, and I have to say it's not nearly as difficult as I had imagined. There are a few things to keep in mind, like not being able to press seams with an iron because the vinyl could melt. And undoing stitching will leave permanent holes. But there is enough vinyl on the roll that, had I needed to cut a new piece, it would not have been a problem at all. 

I loved having the video tutorial again, although this one is not as thorough as the one that came with the Easy Does It pouch I made last year. That one was a beginner pattern, though, so it explained every single step. The Project Bags 2.0 is a step or two up from total newbie, so Annie explains the important bits, and the more difficult steps, but not everything like she did in the beginner series.

Improv pieced border

All of the Project Bags, except the small size, have a decorative border on the front, underneath the vinyl window. In the pattern, the options are a single piece of fabric, or a pieced border using equally sized rectangles that get sewn together. I decided that this was a little too boring so I was going to piece my border randomly from all the scraps I had left in the colours of the heart on the back. 

At first I misread the dimensions and accidentally made the border big enough for the large bag, so I had to trim it down to fit my medium bag.

To make the border, I laid out my scraps and sewed them together in sets of 2 to make them tall enough for the border. Some of them had diagonal edges, so they got sewn that way. Once they were tall enough, I started to add pieces or trim them to make them all rectangular(ish). 

Then I realized my mistake in the sizing, and had to trim the whole things down to fit the medium bag. As you can see, a few interesting bits got cut off, but I tried to trim it so most of it would stay visible. 

I love how it turned out, and I'm a little bummed that I had to trim so much off it because I made it the wrong size, but at this point I had sewn too much of the rest of the bag to pivot to the larger size. 

Future Project Bags

Now that it's finished, I think I could have done the large size, actually, and made the heart stand out a little more on the back of the bag. The block fit well within the measurements of the medium bag, but I added extra borders anyway to have room for quilting, so I think I could have just added a little more there and had the heart framed more on the bag, instead of almost going to the edges of it. But that's something to consider for the next bag. The byAnnie's team was kind enough to send enough materials to make all 4 sizes of Project Bags, so this won't be the last one I made.