Transcripts
1. INTRODUCTION: Hi, I'm Ellie and I'm going to teach you how to make a bag, this bag. My favorite part about being a bag maker and a teacher is really the stuff that I'm passionate about, which is helping you build skills, really like getting you set up to get lost in the flow of making and coming out in the end being really fucking proud of yourselves for what you did. Take this project one step at a time, don't worry about making mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. It's a great way to learn. If you feel like you're falling behind, just press pause, take a break, eat some snacks, and get back to it. I'm going to be there with you every step of the way. We're going to be making the Oberlin Tote. The Oberlin is a rugged stylish take on the classic market Tote. You're going to love this bag, it has four external pockets, one interior pocket with a zipper closure to keep all your [inaudible] safe in your bag, it also has a magnetic snap closure, sturdy leather handles attached with really strong rebits and leather reinforcement just to make sure that your straps stand up through the test of time. Some of the skills you're going to learn in this class are setting the zipper in, doing binding on the interior pocket which is such a fun technique to learn. We're also going to be installing a magnetic snap and installing leather Tote handles with rebits, and last but not least, we're going to be learning how to do French seems, and if you already know how to do it, more power to you, we're going to be perfecting those techniques. All this talk about bag making has gotten me really stoked to make bags with you. If you haven't already, it's time to get out your machine, get out your tools and materials, get out your snacks, and it's time to make.
2. MATERIALS: Let's go over all of the materials that you're going to need to make your Oberlin tote. Starting with the fabric, we suggest a mid to heavy canvas, waxed canvas or denim. This is a waxed canvas and you'll need one yard for your main piece, your base, and your interior pocket. Then we suggest a third a yard for your two exterior pocket pieces and your two interior pocket binding pieces. If you plan on using a fabric that's lighter than a mid to heavy waxed canvas or denim, something closer to like an eight ounce or lighter weight, we suggest interface it with a fusible woven like shape flex or an interfacing like that just to give it a little bit of structure. For your leather straps, you'll need two pieces of 28 inch long by three-quarter inch long, 5-8 ounce midway leather straps. You'll also need eight leather washers to reinforce your leather straps. If you don't have leather washers, you can go ahead and use reinforcement tabs and you can refer to your instruction booklet for the size and the template. You'll need eight double cap rivets that are small to medium, depending on the thickness of leather that you use in your thickness of fabric. The ones we'll be using in this class are a medium with a post link that's around five-sixteenths. We'll also be needing some coordinating thread here. Since my bag is gray and black, I have some all-purpose gray and black. A three-quarter inch D ring that will hang other straps and it'll be a little spot that we can add our keys or hang anything else we want to off our bag like a little bling and of course, our bragging rights label. You got to put that I made this label into your bag, a magnetic snap. You'll also need an eight inch brass zipper non separating for your interior pocket. If you just want to get to sewing and you want to skip all the sourcing and processing of leather then a leather and hardware Oberlin kit is the way to go. If you want to make the Oberlin with our signature wax canvas, the Oberlin full maker kit includes all the fabric, leather, and hardware to make your Oberlin tote. Everything's cut, prepped and ready for you to get to sewing. You can find these in our shop online.
3. TOOLS: Let's go over all the tools in sewing supplies that you're going to need to make your Oberlin tote. Starting with what you'll need for cutting. We have a cutting mat here, and we have three different types of cutting tools, trustee scissors and a rotary cutter that's used in conjunction with the cutting mat, and I have some precision cutting scissors there, which are helpful at certain steps in the Oberlin. We also have a 24 inch by six inch quilting ruler, craft clips, which are great for holding thick fabric in place especially spots where pins won't go through. We have a bone folder here, it's actually a bamboo folder, and that's a great point turner, and this is also really great for the magnetic snap installation. This is my favorite bag making presser foot, it's an edge stitch presser foot, it really helps you sew straight lines when you're doing hems and when you're doing top stitches. Thread snips are always at my machine side. I like to sew with Chrome jeans needles size 100 for the wax canvas that come in a kits, and of course we always need a seam ripper even though we wish we didn't. We have our Clover Chaco Liner Pen, and then these are my favorite pencils to use, Clover Chaco Pell pencils, they're really nice. The line that they make is thin enough that it doesn't add too much weight to your measurements, but it's thick enough that you could see it on heavier weight fabric. Straight pins with a magnetic pin dish. I like to use a circle which organizes the pins flat, and it's safer to use them that way. This is a steel fabric roller, it's really nice for pressing wax canvas, because you can't iron your wax canvas or it'll ruin your iron, and it melts the wax, so we use steel rollers a lot of times to help us finger press the canvas and create really nice creases for our hems. We'll be using a hammer to set our rivets as one of our techniques, but there's a secondary technique which uses a rivet setter and a mallet, but whenever you set your rivets, you also need a really hard surface. This slab of course is great, I got it at a countertop store, a local countertop store and oftentimes they will have off cuts that they can tell you for relatively inexpensive or even for free. To make holes in your fabric or leather straps, I suggest a cutting board with a drive punch and a mallet, or alternatively you can use a rotary leather punch. This is my favorite one to use, we sell it on our site, it has a hydraulic assist and it requires 70 percent less power to squeeze, so that's really helpful too. When you're setting your rivets, we use a 330 seconds drive punch to create holes in the fabric, but if you are making your leather straps, we suggest a one-eighth inch drive punch to make holes in the leather straps. I suggest using a leather pen for marking the leather to make your leather straps. Over here we have pattern weights for when you cut out your fabric, it holds it down nice and flat.
4. GETTING STARTED: FABRIC: Let's go ahead and open up our overland pattern and start cutting out our pattern pieces. The first thing we're going do is actually cut out our pattern pieces. Now that I've cut out my pattern piece, I'm going to grab my fabric and lay my pieces on top to trace them. Now we're going to go ahead and cut out our fabric. This is waxed canvas. I have my yard here for the main, the base in the interior pocket, and I have my 30 yard here for the exterior pockets and the interior pocket trim. I'm going to start with cutting my exterior pocket fabric. Exterior pocket pattern, pattern weights, my rotary cutter, my tracing pencil, and my quilting ruler there. The first thing I would do is just pay attention if my fabric is directional. I just want to make sure I'm cutting it the right direction and I also want to cut it on green or cross green, so we treat on green and cross green as the same with our patterns. I'm going to take a couple pattern weights here to just wave pattern piece down and trace my edges. Then I also want to transfer all my fold to notches and marks, and transfer this center mark. This pattern piece says cut two, so I'm going to go ahead and take it and lay it out right next to the one that I already traced. Now that I've finished transferring all my marks and notches onto the fabric, I'm going to go ahead and cut out my pattern pieces and then I'm going to snip into all of my notch marks. Now let's go ahead and snip into our notch marks. Now I've cut out all of the pattern pieces that I need to cut out of my fabric number 2, my accent fabric. I have my two exterior your pockets and I also have my two interior pocket binding pieces here. I'm going pull in my main fabric. I'm going to go ahead and transfer my notch marks. I'm done tracing all my pattern pieces onto fabric number 1 and also transferring all of my rivet placement marks and my notch marks. I'm going go ahead and use a rotary cutter and a quilting ruler on top of a cutting mat and cut all my pattern pieces out. When I'm laying out my pattern pieces, sometimes I like my pattern pieces to share a line so that I have to make less cuts and it's also a great economy of fabric. I do keep in mind though that I'm working with the solid fabric right now so I don't have to really worry about how the print shows up on the fabric. If you have directional fabric or print on your fabric, that might also dictate how you lay your pattern pieces out so the print shows up on your bag in a way that you really like. When I'm done cutting out the perimeter, I'm just going to take my precision scissors and sniff into my notch marks. I've snipped into all of my notch marks and I'm going to go ahead and just label in the margin here that this is my main fabric. Now, if you want to make sure that you can also read your rivet placement marks from both sides of the fabric, here's a tip. You can actually come in and punch your revit placement mark holes now. You'll have to punch holes again later once this hem is folded because you'll need holes through both sides of your fabric. But what this does now if you want is it ensures that you can read your rivet placement marks from either side of the fabric. Now I'm labeling all of my pattern pieces, but don't feel like you need to. These are all the pieces for fabric one cut and then I also have all my pieces for fabric two cut. These are all the pieces I need to meet the Oberlin tote. Let's get started sewing.
5. PREPPING LEATHER FOR BAGS: So we're just going to be prepping some pieces of leather here in order to show you all how to set rivets. So this is a scrap piece of 5-6 ounce vegetable tanned leather. I'm gonna go ahead and flip it over so I can mark my templates on the back there. I go ahead and put this on and grab a pen and I'm just going to trace the outlines and the spots where I need to punch holes. So I need two of these and then I'm also going to need to reinforcement pieces of leather for the inside of the bag. These can share a line there. So we're going to cut the straight lines with a rotary cutter, on a self-healing cutting mat with a ruler in order to cut the three edges. And then I'll show you guys how to use a round end punch in order to cut the curves on these during tabs that we're going to add onto the tout. So the first thing I'm going to do here is just line up my ruler with a line that I made on the leather and cut my scrap off and cut my reinforcement tabs out. There's three edges. So those are cut there. And then we'll move over and cut the round edges also. So we are going to need around and punch that's three-quarters inch wide because this is a three-quarter inch wide strap, a cutting board and a mallet. I like to still work on a hard surface. So I'm going to set this leather strap on this cutting board and I already marked where I want the curve to be. I'm going to set that in with some pressure there. and I'm going to grab a mallet and just hit it until it flies off. Here's my leather that's been punched with around end. and then I'm going to come down here and grab this one. Then over to this side here and now we have our straps with the round and punch. Then I'll show you guys how to punch holes in this and set rivets. So first I'm going to show you guys how to punch holes in this leather with the Drive punch. Size its 330 seconds. The way that I figured out that size is this is the rivet I'm going to be using. It's a 2205 size. and you could see there that I want to hole that's roughly the size of the post of the rivet. So this is a great size for that and we want to be working on a cutting board with a mallet. So I'm just going to center my punch over my mark and just hit it lightly, and then we'll get a nice hole in that they are. So I'm going to go ahead and do that to the rest of these here. So now we have our leather pieces ready to be added to our bag. Another great tool to use in order to cut holes in leather and fabric is a rotary leather punch with lots of different options. These are basically mini drive punches here in, so to find the right size barrel, and we're going to hold our rivet up to it and pick a size. This one seems nice here, it's the smallest one on there. That's the 330 seconds one and then you're just going to go ahead and squeeze that barrel down on the mark. Sometimes it can be hard to squeeze. So then you can use both hands. Grab the end of the rotary punch in squeezing until you hear at punch through. So now all of our leather is prepared in order to set the rivets.
6. PREPARE EXTERIOR POCKETS: Let's go ahead and prepare our exterior pockets, to sew the top hems. I'm just going to work with one pocket at a time, and I'm going to draw lines connecting these fold two marks at the top of the pocket here. I'm on the wrong side of the pocket, I'm just using this quilting ruler here, and then I'm going to draw lines to connect these. What these are lines that you're actually going to fold the fabric to meet in order to create a double turn hem at the top of the pocket. Now we have these really nice guidelines, that we can fold the fabric to meet. I'm going to take the raw edge of the fabric, and just finger press it, folding it up to that first line, creating a half-inch hem. Now one of my new favorite tools to use is a steel fabric roller, and this is a great tool for pressing wax canvas because, we can't use an iron on wax canvas because it melts the wax, and it's not good for your iron. This tool is really handy, in order to get a nice press. Now this is one term, but we're creating a double turn hem. I'm going to turn this one more time, to finish off my double turn hem at the top of my exterior pocket piece here. I'm going to take the roller and just press that again. I like to create full two lines because they don't like the line to disappear when you're folding it. Then once you have that line there, you could see it the whole way across and you know that you've created a parallel fold. There's our second fold there, and then we're just going to go ahead and grab some craft clips, to hold our fold in place. That's one pocket, and then we'll do the same to the other pocket. Now we've prepared both our exterior pockets in order to sew the hems on the top of the pockets, sew me at the machines. We're going to go ahead and sew the top hem down on the exterior pockets, and I'm going to be using an edge ditch presser foot. The edge stitch presser foot has a little guide bar on it here, and that will run along the folded edge of your pocket and give you a straight stitch in relation to the fold. That's a really nice presser foot to use to sew hems and we use it a lot for bag making. I'm going to go ahead and switch that out. When you use an edge stitch foot, for this model of machine, you need to put the needle over to the right in this case. I'm going to come up here to needle position in switch the needle to the right, and my positioning for the edge stitch foot here, is I want it to run along the folded open edge of my pocket. Sometimes they see people use it along this edge and that's not the edge that we want to sew closed, it's this edge here. Set my needle end, do a few forward and back stitches, and I'm sewing on a stitch length of 2.5. When I'm using the edge switch foot, I can just watch my fabric next to that guide bar on the foot, and just keep my fabric against that, and that ensures that I get a nice straight stitch for this hem. Little backstage to finish off. There's my stitch from the right side. Then we'll do the same to the other pocket piece. Now we've sewed the top hem to both of our exterior pocket pieces and it's time to lay them out on the main body peace.
7. ATTACH EXTERIOR POCKETS: Now that we've sewn the hems on the top of our exterior pockets, it's time to make some marks in the middle of the pockets. Those will be lines that will sew on later in order to divide each pocket piece into two pockets when we sew it to the bag. The first thing that we're gonna do is we're going to locate our center notch here. In our center notch up here, which is now folded into the hem. So what we could do to find the center is fold our pocket in half, if you're working with waxed canvas, and you can actually just crease it in order to find the center. So I can see that crease mark show-up rate their. Alternatively, you could measure half of 19, which is 9.5, and create a center mark at the top. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to connect these marks. I recommend using a light hand, because this is the exterior of your fabric and this mark will show. You want a line that you could see, and so you don't want to make it too light, but you also don't want to make it too dark either. So let's go ahead and do that to both of our pieces. Let's go ahead and lay these out on our main body peace, and pin them in place and then we'll be ready to sew them down. Here is my main fabric. The first thing I'm gonna do is create my top of pocket placement marks on the right side of this main tote body. I'm going to measure down six inches from the top raw edge, and just make myself a healthy mark there. It's going to make these marks a little bit longer than my notch marks here so that you don't confuse them. I know that this is my top of pocket placement marks and these are my fold two marks for the hem later. I'm going to do that on one side of the tote and also on the other. Now, that I've prepped my placement marks on the main body. I can go ahead and lay out my exterior pockets. I'm coming up here to the side and I am aligning the top of the pocket piece with the marks that I just made. Which is my top of pocket placement marks. I'm also aligning the side raw edges. Before I put some pins in and pin and place. The first stitch that we're going to make is going to be the center stitch that's going to divide this pocket piece into two pockets. I'm going to just come in with some straight pins and pin along this line. Now, it can be kind of hard to pin into thick fabric. I suggest to really manipulating the fabric instead of the pin. So you can see how I'm lifting up the fabric and pushing it into the pin as I also push the fabric. Now, I'm going to come over to the other pocket piece, align it at the top with the top of pocket placement marks and the side raw edges. Again, here I'm lifting the fabric and pushing it into the pin, as I push the pin into the fabric. That's just going to make it a little bit easier for you to pin thick fabric. Now, we're going to go do these stitches and we're going to stitch up the center line, and then we're actually going to create a bar tack stitch at the very top of the pockets, and that's going to create a really strong point there. Which is a stress point on the bag where the pocket opens and closes. I'm just going to make one more mark and this is for the bar tack that we're going to sew. It needs to be an eighth of an inch down from the folded edge here and just a quarter inch long. I'm just going to use my ruler here, and just give myself a little guideline here. This is where I'll be sewing like a tight little zigzag as a bar tack and that will be a little reinforcement stitch for this pocket divider stitch. So draw that on both pocket pieces. We're going to go ahead and sew the pocket divider stitch first and then will sew the bar tack second. The last stitch we sewed on our machine was an edge stitch. I'm going to switch out my edge stitch presser foot for a regular presser foot and center my needle, and then I'll be ready to do that first pocket divider stitch. It's best to roll your work up to get it through the throat of the machine. I'm going to start at the bottom of my pocket here and work my way up to the top. I'm going to sew the pocket dividers stitches first and then go back in and sew the bar tacks. I'm holding my fabric up on the same plane as the bed of the machine and it really helps the machine feed the fabric through. I'm just guiding my fabric and my work along. So that I can have a stitch right on that chalk mark that I drew earlier. Also notice that I put my pins in far enough away from my stitch here. They don't have to take them out while I'm sewing. I'm going to sew this up to the top and then just do a little back stitch, and then go in and sew the other side. Now, that I've got my divider stitch in, I'm going to change the settings on my machine, and do my bar tack at the top of the pockets. I'm going to come over to this exact stitch, and I'm actually going to take my stitch length down to just one or two clicks above one. I'm going to take my stitch with up to a little under halfway, and you can always grab a scrap piece of fabric and test out your zigzag settings before you sew them on your project, and that looks great to me. I just want my zigzag to be a little over or around an eighth inch wide, and I just want it to be pretty tight. I'm going to pull my work in now that I have the correct zigzag settings, and just zigzag over that little chalk mark that I had made earlier. I'm really just going to go a few stitches forward and a few stitches back, and that's it. Just to give some reinforcement right up there at the top of the pocket. Make it a strong stitch connection right there. I'm going to do that same bar tack to the other pocket piece. Just stitching back and forth on top of that chalk line that I drew earlier. Now, I'm done sewing my pocket divider stitch.
8. PREPARE + ATTACH BASE LAYER: Let's prepare the base layer before we sew it onto the bag. We're going to be creating single turn hems on to edges. We're working on the wrong side of our fabric here and I'm just going to connect my full two notches to make a full two line for myself. The single turn hem on the space is actually a three-quarter inch single turn hem. Our full two notches and lines for this are actually an inch and a half in from the raw edge. I'm just going to finger press this because I'm working with wax canvas. If you are working with a non-wax canvas, you could go to the iron to do this press and just roll the steel roller on here and get a really nice press, so I'm going to do that to both of my edges. Now that we've folded the hems onto the base layer, I'm going to grab our main body piece and we're going to place these on so that the right side of the base is faced up and the right side of the body piece is faced up. I'm looking at the center points here and I'm going to align those notches and then I'm going to come over here and align these notches, the center point is here. My next stitch is going to be edge stitching these hems of the base down onto the main body. I'm going to grab some straight pins and just pin this in place. Sometimes it's hard to get a pin into this middle point on the bag because it's so thick and that's when I really want you to remember that you can manipulate the fabric. If you need to, just lift your fabric all the way up and push your fabric into the pin and that just makes it a lot easier. Now, in order to prepare to sew these edge stitches, I'm going to roll my fabric so that I can manage the weight of the fabric a lot better when I'm at the machine and now I'm ready to sew this. I'm going to go ahead and sew the base layer onto the main body using an eighth inch edge stitch along the hem here and on the other hem. I went ahead and switched out my presser foot for an edge stitch presser foot. I'm going to make sure my needle is offset to the left, then I'll get that nice clean edge stitch along the folded hem. We're going to do that same stitch to the other side of the base. Rolling up our work so that we can work on this side now and manage the bulk. I just love using an edge stitch foot. You get such a nice clean stitch along a folded edge. It turns out looking like so much more professional. Now we're ready to move on with our bag.
9. BASTE POCKETS + BASE: So we've sewn our base and our pockets onto our main body and our toe is really starting to shape up. Now, before we based the sides of the pocket and the sides of the base down onto the main body, we have a moment here where we can check alignments that our points are matching. We can also shore up these edges of the fabric with a rotary cutter so that they align really nicely. It's going to just be a little bit easier to do this stitch on the sides where we based it. I'm just going to shave off any excess fabric that's hanging over the main body piece. That just gives us a really nice clean edge to sew along in the next step. Do that to both sides if you need to. You might find that you don't need to do this step. Everything is aligning really nicely and that's great too. But just in case you have some fabric hanging over just like that, this just feels really nice to clean up your work. It also is a nice reminder that every time you saw something, it doesn't necessarily need to be perfectly aligned at that moment. Stuff shifts when it's at your machine. Just fabric and work shifts sometimes even though you don't want it to. It's nice to have these moments in the pattern where you get to just clean it up and almost restart. Now that I have those edges cleaned up it feels so good to have that done. I'm going to go ahead and pin these tops of the pockets down and the sides of the base down. I'm going to start with just pinning it, but then I'm going to check and see if my points are matched before I commit to stitching them down. It's a stitch that's not going to show on the final bag, but it's really going to help hold all of these pieces in place so that when you do your front seams, everything is already held in place and you could just focus on the side seams, instead of worrying about if you're capturing the sides of your pocket and base. Now that I've pinned this, before I go and sew it, I'm actually just going to fold this in half. Align the top of my main piece and just check that the tops of my pockets are aligned and the tops of my base are aligned. That looks great there and there. Now, I'm going to check this side too, matching up the top of the bag and just check the top of the pockets. Now, if for some reason I go and check this and they see something that's more like this where the tops of the pockets aren't aligned, I have this moment now before they're sewn down to take the pins out and just pull them to align. You might end up realizing that you'll have to do some easing when you're at the machine to get them to sew on in a way where they align. But at least now, if you check it before you sew it, you'll know what you're working with when you're at the machine. All this looks really great. Now, I'm going to get ready to sew down just base and stitch these here to tuck them down and get ready to sew the hems after that. I'm just going to use a 1/4 inch seam allowance with a standard regular presser foot and a centered needle. I can just align the raw edge of the fabric with a right side of my regular presser foot because that's a standard quarter inch. I've just stitched from the top of this exterior pocket to the top of this one here. Now, I can go ahead and sew the other side too. Great. Our bag is really taking shape.
10. PREPARE TOTE HEMS: Now that we have the sides of our pockets in our base, based it on to the main piece, we're going to go ahead and fold and prep the tote hems of the bag. We're going to work on the wrong side of the fabric. We're going to locate our full two marks for our double turn hem at the top of the bag. We have one right here and there's a notch there for the other one. I'm going to draw that also down here and here. This is one inch in, and then this down here is 5.5 inches from the raw edge. I'm going take my quilting ruler and I'm going to draw lines to connect these notches. Those are my fold two lines. I going to to grab my steel roller and fold the raw edge to meet that first fold two line just finger pressing since I'm on waxed canvas. You can go to the iron if you're not and following along with the steel roller to get a nice press. Then I have a second fold because it's a double turn hem. This is the hem at the top of the bag. We're folding to crease this right now to prep our hem. Then we'll install the magnetic snap once we know the hem widths. I'm going to do the same thing to the other side. We have our hems prepared and ready to install the magnetic snap.
11. INSTALL MAGNETIC SNAP: We're going to install the magnetic snap. It has two sides. They receive each other and then these two prongs here and then two washers. The first thing that we're going to do is we're actually going to make some marks on the hem, so we know where to install it. We're on the inside of the tote, and here's the ham that we just folded. I need to find the middle of the hem this way and this way. Half of 19 is nine and a half, so I'm just going to make a little mark there. I can also tell that that mark there is in line with that middle stitching line on the pocket, then we're going to make a mark also height-wise. Half of two and a half is one and a quarter. We want to end up with a cross-hair mark like that. That denotes the middle of the hem this way and this way. Then I'm going to take a washer, and I'm going to place it over the cross-hair with the two slits on either side and then just color them in with the chalk pencil. I'm going to be cutting on those lines. I'm going to open the hem now. It's really important on this step that you do not cut through both layers of your hem. Were only cutting our holes through this part of the hem. We're going to cut little slits into the fabric, and the best way to cut those is with precision cutting scissors or just small scissors. I'm actually going to fold my hem in half like this, and just make little snips in those spots that I colored in through the washer. You can always air on the side of making those slits smaller than you think because the fabric will stretch. We want to just push one of our magnetic snaps through those holes. There's one side, then this is what the backside looks like. Now, I'm going to place the washer on top there. I'm going to grab my bamboo folder here and actually use it to press these prongs out, securing the magnetic snap onto my fabric. There's one side and will do the same thing to the other side. First, we need to create the cross-hair marks both lengthwise and height twice. Half of the 19 is nine and a half. This mark here at one and a quarter because that's half of two and a half. Now, I'm going to grab the washer for the other side of the snap. Place it so that the cross-hair mark is showing through the center circle, and color in the slits on either side. We're going to cut into our fabric, making sure you're only cutting into hem. I'm just making small snip marks. Now that I have those, I can take my magnetic snap and push it through, so the prongs go through the slit marks. Then I'll take my washer, place it on top, and then push those tabs out. That's all. There is to it.
12. SEW INTERIOR POCKET: In order to prepare the interior pocket for sewing, we're going to go ahead and connect these pairs of notches here. Now, up to this point, a lot of our notches were fold two notches, which is true for one pair. But this other pair notches is actually delineating the top of the zipper placement. So we're not going to be folding that one, but let's go ahead and trace that line so we have it now, and we'll fold two on this side to prepare to attach the zipper, but we're only doing it to one side of the pocket, and this is the wrong side here. Now the interior pocket is ready for the first stitch, sewing the zipper on. Let's prepare to sew the zipper into the interior pocket. We want to work with a zipper, right side up, which is the side where the slider is showing, and then we also want to work with the right side of our interior pocket piece. Remember, we folded the hen to the wrong side. We're going to work with the folded side, which is the hem that's going to attach to the zipper. We'll align the folded hem of the interior pocket piece, a scant eighth inch away from the zipper teeth. Then we're just going to pin that in place. We're also aligning the edges of the zipper tape with the raw edges of the fabric. Now we're going to so the interior zipper to the interior pocket piece. We never want to sew next to the zipper slider, so I'm going to go ahead and open the zipper in order to start my stitch. I'm going to sew this with a regular presser foot. I'm going to offset my needle to the right. In this basically just mimics a zipper foot. If your machines needle doesn't go to the right, then you're welcome to use a zipper foot to sew this. You just want to create a top stitch that's about an eighth of an inch away from the folded edge of the fabric, and I also want to manage the zipper tape reveal here and make sure that it's consistent. I like using a regular presser foot to sew a zipper because I really like how much surface area of the presser foot compress down on the feed dog and the fabric, and it creates a less slippery feeling stitch. I also like how I can track the zipper teeth along the right side of the presser foot in order to make sure I get a consistently straight stitch. I'm going to go ahead and move the zipper slider out of the way, and I like to do this in four steps. The first step is to set the needle into the fabric using the hand wheel. If you stop sewing and the needles are ready in, then you could skip step one. Step two is to lift the presser foot, and step three is to move the slider back to the part that you already sewed. Step four is to put the presser foot back down. Then you can finish sewing without the zipper slider in the way. Now we have sewn the first stitch of our interior pocket and let's get ready to sew the second stitch. What we want to do is, this is the right side of the fabric. We want to take this edge down here and fold it up behind the zipper so that we make this pocket here, which is the pocket. Then we're going to take this edge of the zipper tape and we're going to align it with that top of zipper placement mark that we made earlier, then we can grab some straight pins and actually pin the zipper tape in place. I'm going to open my zipper in order to get a pin in there. Now, when you do this stitch, make sure that you do a stitch that's really close to this upper edge of the zipper tape, and that so that we actually end up covering this stitch later when we have the hem on top of this. If you do your stitch too far down, you risk the stitch being exposed beneath the hem. It's just going to look a lot cleaner if we're able to cover the stitch that we're about to do. Then now I'm going to go back to my machine and sew this on. Now I'm actually going to take my needle to the right so I can get a stitch right up next to the zipper tape on the top edge. I'm going to move my slider out of the way with those four steps that we did in the last stitch, and now we have a nice zipper sewn onto their interior pocket. To keep the sides of the pocket from shifting, I'm going to go ahead and sew them down with a quarter inch seam allowance. I'm going to put my needle back to center. I always want to check my settings before I go in and do another stitch, because the settings that I left my machine on might not be the right settings for this stitch. This is just really tacking down the sides of this pocket so they don't shift when I put the binding on. The zipper slider obstructs the shape of the zipper tape. I'm going to go ahead and move that out of the way so I can get this sewn down nice and cleanly. Now that we've tacked down the sides of the pocket, it's ready for the binding to be attached. We're going to fold our binding in half lengthwise, grab our roller, and just press it. Again, if you're on non-wax canvas, you could press it at the iron. Then we're going to take a raw edge here and just fold it in just shy of the center line of that center crease that you did earlier. Then we're going to fold it back in half and press it again one more time. So we're creating our binding for the sides of the interior pocket. We're going to do the same thing to the other binding piece. Fold it back in half and just crease it. Press it really nice. Now, the first thing we're going to do before we attach these is we're just going to make sure our zipper is open halfway or a little over halfway. Then we're going to open up a binding piece and we want to clip this onto our pocket right sides together aligning the top raw edge in this side raw edge, so some of this binding is going to hang off the bottom. I'll take some craft clips, aligning this site edges here. Then we're going to take the excess binding that's hanging off the edge here and we're going to fold it back to the back of the pocket just like that, and we're going to clip that in place too. This is one of my favorite techniques for applying binding. It just comes out really nice and clean. Let's go ahead and open up this piece here. We're going to attach this onto our pocket right sides together. Again, aligning the top raw edges, and folding the excess binding around the bottom into the back of the pocket, just like that. Our first stitch here to attach the binding is just going to be right in here, shy of this crease right here. We're going to go and sew that along there. Then we'll do the same on this side here. I'm going to grab my magnetic seam guide, which is just a really nice little tool to help guide my seam allowance. I'm going to put that at the half inch seam guide on the face plate. Making sure my needle is centered, I'm going to go ahead and stitch this down. I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. Those are the first stitches of my binding. Now, this is a really cool part where we're going to actually pull the binding over, flip it to the back. What I really like about this is it gives us this chance to get a nice clean edge on the back and the front of our binding. I've pulled it to the back, and then I'm going to refold that. Now I have a chance if I want to right here to clip some of that bulk out. I'm going to go ahead and grab my precision cutting scissors and snip a little bit away there. I just cut an angle into the fabric there, and now I can pull this around and it's just a little less bulky. I'm going to take a clip and click this into place. I'm going to continue to pull the binding around to the back of the pocket and clip it into place. We'll do the same for the other one. We can also clip some of the bulk out of the seam allowance now if we want from the binding rolled around the bottom edge of the pocket. Then we're going to pull the binding around to the back of the pocket. I can clip some of this bulk out too. You want to make sure when you're snipping the binding fabric out to reduce bulk, that you don't get a cut too close to this folded edge here because we don't want the raw edge here to poke out the bottom. We just want to make sure all of our raw edges are still really well hidden. Here we go. Not just feels way less bulky there. The machine's going to enjoy sewing that more and it's going to lay a lot flatter. I'm actually going to sew this with the front of the pocket face up because honestly, that's the side that I care about more how the stitch looks. Even though this is the side of the binding that is actually still open and exposed, it's this side that you're really going to see because this is going to be hanging inside of your bag, and no one's ever really going to flip this up and look at the back of your interior pocket. But when you peak into your bag, you're going to see the front of this pocket. Let's go ahead and sew it this face up and we'll just be able to control the results a little bit better on the front side of the pocket. I'm going to move my seam guide out of the way, and I'm actually going to switch back to an edge stitch presser foot because I want to run an edge stitch here along the edge of the binding to sew it down. I'm going to make sure to push my needle over to the right, in this case, and if I was sewing from the bottom with the binding on my left side, I would move the needle to my left. Now we have our first binding stitch there and it just lays so flat and so clean. It looks so nice. There's the back. You're going to do that same stitch on the other side. Sometimes if you start on a really thick spot, you might just need to give your work a little push to help the machine get over that hump of thick fabric. Those are the last stitches of our interior pocket construction. Now it's ready to be added to the bag.
13. SEW THE TOTE HEM: Now that we've completed our interior pocket, it's time to attach it to the main bag. When we attach the interior pocket to the main bag we also sew the hems down. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to mark the center of the interior pocket to align it with the center of the hem here. The pocket is 9.5 inches long and half of that is four and three-quarters. I'm going to go ahead and mark at four and three-quarters. Then I can place that into the hem. Now when I'm placing this into the hem, I'm going to carry my halfway mark a little bit lower, so I can still see it when I place it in and I also want to know the center point of my hem too, but the center point of my hem runs right through the center of the magnetic snap. I'm just going to carry that down with a little chalk marked here. Now, I can align my center points in order to know where to sew this. Now your alignment is all sew, so that we can cover up the stitching line on the zipper tape here too. This is an interesting stitch because one of the things we want to track when we're doing this stitch is we want to make sure that we actually capture the zipper tape, but we also need presser foot clearance for the zipper slider and the zipper teeth. Which basically means that we need more reveal of the zipper tape on the top side of the zipper tape, than on the bottom. Here you get about an eighth inch reveal of this zipper tape here, but on the top of the zipper we're looking more at 3.87 inch reveal. Now I'm going to stick some pins in here and just get this all to stay together. You also have a chance right here to throw in your clammy house, I made this label. If you bought a maker kit or a leather and hardware kit or you can just purchase one of these off of our site. This is just a really great little. I made this flag that you can fly in your totes. When you show your tote off to your friends and family, you can point out your little, I made this flag. Let's go ahead and put that in here. You can put it wherever you want in the hem, but just to make sure that you don't put it too close to the raw edge, so it doesn't accidentally get captured in the french seem when you're sewing. I've pinned this hem down. Now I'm going go and pin the other side down. Now we have our hems pinned down and we're ready to sew them down. We're going to do an edge stitch just to sew the him down. I'm going to use an edge stitch presser foot and I already have my needle offset to the right for this because the hem is on the right side. Just remember that this stitch is going to go through all the layers of fabric. I'm using an edge stitch, which means I'm going to have to manage the edge stitch guide right here when I hit the pocket. So I'll show you how to do that till. I'm just going to hold my workup so it's supported. Makes it a lot easier for me to get a straight stitch. There is the edge stitch guide just running into the pocket. I'm actually just going to lift it up, so that the guide is now on top of the pocket and then now it'll just glide up onto it and right off of it. Also notice because I've placed my pocket farther down from the hem, I have plenty of presser foot clearance here with the zipper teeth, although I probably still have to move the slider out of the way. Let's go ahead and deal with the zipper slider. In the same way we would when we're sewing the zipper. Now I have my edge stitch hitting the pocket bindings. So I'm just going to lift it up. It lands on top of that and the same thing with the label. We're going to sew our hem down on the other side of the bag too. This hem is a lot more straight forward than the other side because there's nothing tucked into it. So now we have our hem sewed down and it's time to sew the french seems on the sides of our bag.
14. SEW THE BAG TOGETHER: So now that we've sewed our hems down, it's time to sew the bag together using French seams. So we're going to be folding the bag in half, wrong sides together because French seams are done with two stitches, and the first stitch is a wrong sides together stitch. The second stitch is when we turn it out and we do one more stitch. I want to make sure that the sides of my bag are lined up. So I'm going to align the very tops of the bag here and then I'm going to stick a pin in to hold those in place. Now there's a few other points that I care about them aligning so I'm going to stick pins in to align those and that's the top of the pocket there, and the tops of the base there. Then if you want, you can stick more pins or clips in there in-between the pins that are already in there. Our first stitch is actually going to be a quarter inch seam, which will be chasing this stitch that we already did. So let's go ahead and set up the other side also. So I went ahead and flipped my work and I'm going to put my pins on this site of the tote because this is the side that's going to be face up when I'm sewing. Because with the rule of thumb with sewing and the bulk of your work goes to the left of your machine. You're going to have this side face up when you sew this side seam. So you can see I have a little bit of easing to do right there as I pulled the tops of my pocket there to align. So I'll be doing that when I'm sewing this together at the machine. Easiness really just pulling, sewing two lengths of fabric together. Even if they're slightly different lengths of fabric, you want to sew them together so they align. Now I'm going to go to the machine and do the first stitches of my French seam. So I'm back on a regular presser foot with my needle centered and the right side of the presser foot is actually a quarter inch seam allowance guide. So I'm just going to make sure that I stay along there. You can see I'm just chasing my previous basting stitch. Flip it over and sew the other side seam. Now the first seams for the French seam are done. So we're just going to grade the seam allowance here by cutting the bulk out of 1.5 of the seam allowance on one side. This is just going to really help our French seams be cleaner, especially if you're working with thicker fabric. So after we're done creating the seam allowance on both of our sides seams we're going to turn our bag wrong side out to prepare to sew the second side of the French seam. So I really want to take my time here to really push out my bag at the first side seam that I sewed. I'm not so concerned with this corner turning exactly out, especially because remember we're going to box the corners down here, and this isn't the true corner of the bag. This is just, it's going to disappear into the boxed corner triangle that we're going to create later. So I'm just taking a moment here to roll this seam out and flatten it and just to really set the side seams up here so that I know when I create that second stitch of my French seam, that I'm not going to catch any of my previous seam allowance in that, that it's not going to show through on the finished product of my bag. So in order to really ensure that first seam allowance, gets really captured inside the French seam I need to make sure I'm really pushing this out and as much as possible, flattening it down. Now our second seam for the French seam is a half inch seam allowance. So you can go ahead and grab some of your craft clips and just stick some clips in to prepare for that stitch. Now if for some reason your fabric is really bulky, then you might want to sew at this with a zipper foot and offset the needle to the right, it basically allows the zipper foot to press on less bulk and still get a stitch in close to that half inch seam allowance. So one of the reasons that we're sewing this with a French seam is because that this fabric so thick, the fabric that's suggested for the pattern, that in order to sidestep the bulk of the fabric and still get a nice finished clean stitch. A French seam is really the best way to go. So now I'm set up to sew the second stitch for my French seam, and that's going to be at a half inch seam allowance. So I'm going to grab my magnet and place it on the face plate at the half inch seam allowance line and sew this down. When you go from sewing through less layers of fabric onto more layers of fabric, the sewing machine likes to take it a little bit slow as it jumps onto more layers. So it's best to not sew really fast when you're going from less layers to more layers. Then we'll sew the other side. By flipping the bag over, I always like to start my stitches from the top of the bag. Getting a really nice back stitch in there. Now we've got the French seams of our side seams sewn.
15. CONSTRUCT BOXED CORNERS: It is now we have finished our French seams and we are going to sew the box corners into the bag. To prepare for our box corners, what we want to do is reach inside the bag, and flatten the bag out, so that the bottom corner forms a triangle. Now don't be afraid to really pull the bag out from the middle, and we call this really bossing the fabric around because right now you're creating a three-dimensional object and you really just got to engage your hands, and push the fabric into position. This is really the step that gives the bag some depth and body. Notice how, even though it might feel messy, I have all this part down here of the bag, I'm just pushing it out of the way and really just flattening the part that I am really going to be working on, which is this boxed corner. Now the first thing that I am going to do is I'm just going to keep the seam allowance into vertical and I just want to first start by eyeballing that the seam allowance is straight down the middle of the triangle. Now I'm going to measure that in a second, but for now I am just setting this up and flattening the triangle here, and then I am going to push the seam allowance to the right. Now it's important that you push it to the right because when we're sewing this, we're going to be going from this direction, and we want the presser foot to come up onto this bulk and drop off of it. We do not want to make it jump up onto the bulk, to start with. We're pushing it to the right. Now also, let me just tell you, trust your eye that this is centered when the seam allowance is vertical because the second that you fold it to the right, it's no longer going to look centered. Now I'm going to grab my ruler. I like to use a smaller square quilting ruler for this, so that I can measure and what I want to measure is two and a half inches down from the stitched tip of the triangle, and I am going to make a mark on the seam allowance there. Now, I'm actually going to come here, and measure and see if from the very edge of the fabric to the stitching line, I want that to be two and a half inches too, and it is. Now I'm going to flip my seam allowance over so I can check the measurement, so if you want, you can transfer this two and half-inch mark on the seam allowance. You can also remark it here because what I want you to check is, is it two and half inches also from the stitching line to the edge of your fabric here and it is. Basically we are able to get this two and a half inch mark here to here, and to here. Now, another way to look at this too, is if you want, you could see through the quilting ruler, and you want to make sure that a line on the quilting ruler is in line with your stitch. In that way you know when you make this chalk mark that it's perpendicular to this stitching line. We actually want to draw a line all the way across, and that's going to be aligned that we stitch on, that's our stitching line to form our box corner. I'll make it a little bit darker. Now after you find that, we'll go ahead and stick some craft clips in there, to hold it in place, and you want to do the same thing to the other corner. I'm going to flip this around, push all the bulk down, open up the corner. The first step is to really just flatten it out, and with the seam allowance vertical, just try to eyeball that being centered and now we can actually measure. I'm going to flip the seam allowance to the right, and from the stitched tip of the triangle, so my stitching, this should be two and half inches, so I'm going to make a mark on the seam allowance. I can flip the seam allowance over, and make that two and half inch mark on that side too. Now I want to really make sure I'm pulling the bag all the way open. So the mistake I see here a lot of times is people like keeping the seam allowance collapsed like that, and you really need to pull it all the way open so it's the full expression of the triangle, and then you can turn your seam allowance to the right. Now we need to check this measurement, and make sure that's two and a half and check this measurement, and make sure that's two and a half. If it's not two and a half inches, then we can adjust the triangle. We have two and a half inches right there, so that looks great. We also have it there, now, so for some reason, say, you ended up thinking that this was vertical. Let me show you what it looks like if it's not correct, and I go and fold the seam allowance to the right to check this. Now, you could see there that this is three inches from the tip to the stitching, so that's actually a little too long. If I fold this over and check over here, you could see that I'm only at like two and a quarter inches there. Basically the triangle is off-center, there is too much here in here. I really want to make sure I set this up, so that I am two and a half inches here and here, so that I get a nice even straight box corner. Because if I was to sew this now this would be a crooked box corner. Now I know I have too much over here, and not enough there, so I'm actually going to adjust my fabric, by pulling the side seam a little bit to this side, taking up less fabric here and giving more over here. Now I have a two and half inch measurement there, from the very edge of the fabric to the stitching line, and a two and half inch measurement there. Then I'm going to fold the seam allowance to the right, and draw a line across, making sure that it's perpendicular to my stitching line here. This is going to be my stitch on-line for my boxed corner. Throw a couple of clips in there. Then we'll go ahead and get our box corners stitched down, and we'll be done stitching our bag. Just going to use a regular presser foot with my needle centered, and I have my seam allowance here folding down towards me, so that the presser foot can come up onto the bulk and jump off of it. I want to make sure we get a really good back stitch in the beginning. I also want to pause and not sew too fast up onto this thick bulk stuff here. If your machine is winding through the bulk here, you can always use your hand wheel and walk your hand wheel doing manual stitches, helping the needle really find its way through that thick parts of the fabric. I'm just going to go ahead and do that right here, until I am off the bulk. You get a nice back stitch in there, and we'll sew the other side. I'm actually going to show you an alternative way to sew this, just in case you're sewing machine is winding too much through the bulk of the fabric. One of the great things about this stitch is you actually don't need to do this whole box corner stitch all in one go. You can sew up to your French seam here, up to the seam allowance. Do a back stitch and then come in the other direction, folding this up and sew up to here, and just let your seam allowance hang out in there. You don't have to make your machine sew over this bulk if it's just not wanting to do it. Let's go ahead and do this in two steps instead of one step, and that's just a great alternative for those of you that whose machines just wind too much through this bulk. You still need to sew your box corner and this is one way to get it done. I'm just going to do a back stitch up to my side seam stitch. Then I'm going to take my work out, snip my threads there. I'm going to come in from this side. Which means that I'm going to roll my work so that it fits into the throat of my machine. I'm going to sew the box corner from this angle, all the way up to the side seam, flipping my seam allowance out of the way. You'll be pleasantly surprised to see that on the right side of the bag, you can't even tell which of the box corners was sewn in each of the different techniques. I'll go ahead and start turning my bag out, and the best way to do that is to poke the bottom corners out first, and you're welcome to grab a point turner. If you need to get it in there to really poke your corners out, and there's our overland toe, and now we just need to add the leather straps. You could see this box corner here, and this one here and you can't even tell the difference between how I sewed one or the other. That's two techniques there for sewing your box corners, and let's get some leather straps on this.
16. ATTACH LEATHER STRAPS: The next thing we're going to do is attach these leather tote straps to our tote. I just pulled out this already finished bag to just show you where we're going with this and some of the common things to look out for. First off, we really want to make sure that we don't forget our leather washers because those really add an extra layer of reinforcement when we're attaching our tote straps to the bag and they really make this sturdy, strong attachment point for our straps which are going to be working so hard carrying all the stuff in our tote. Secondly, one of the things that I see that's really common is people actually forget to put their strap in before they set their hardware, which I know sounds really silly. But I think it's one of those moments where you're so focused on the rivets that you forget to look at the bigger picture. Really want to come back and forth between macro and micro and really check that what you're doing if it makes sense. The other thing that can be tricky to remember is that we want to set the same strap to the same side of the tote. I often see folks taking one end of the strap and attaching it to one side and taking the other end of the strap and attaching it the other side of the tote and that makes the handles actually face the wrong direction for using the tote. I'm just calling out these steps and these little mishaps that I see along the way that we're going to try and avoid as we attach our leather straps. Let's grab the bag that we're working on now and the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to punch holes in all eight rivet placement marks. Now you might have already punched holes through one layer, but you need to punch holes through both layers of your fabric. All eight holes, so four on this side and four on this side. Now there's two different ways to make holes in your fabric. You can either use a rotary leather punch set to the correct barrel size and the way that you choose the correct barrel size is you could take a rivet stem and you really want to make sure that you're punching a hole the size of the rivet stem. Not too big, and not too small. With the fabric, you can usually air on the side of smaller because as you push the rivet through, it will open up the hole in the fabric. Generally we're shooting for a punch size that's a three 30-seconds so this is one way. You can go ahead and squeeze this on to the tote hem and often times you'll hear a little click as it punches through. Now, I really like this rotary punch. It has a hydraulic assist and actually takes 70 percent less power to squeeze. These are made in Germany and I just really like using high-quality tools and sourcing high-quality tools. This is a rotary punch that we sell on our site in the supply section. That's one tool that you can use and the other way that you can make holes in your bag is with a mallet, a cutting board, and a three 30-second strive punch. This is really fun, especially if you like hitting things or whacking things. I'm just going to take my cutting board and put it under my work and then I can take my three 30-second strive punch right over my rivet hole and just tap it with the mallet. That's also a great way to make holes in your fabric. We want to remember to use mallets when we're hitting metal tools as opposed to just a hammer. You get a way better force transfer and it also preserves the longevity of your metal tool. Now that I have holes in my tote, I'm going to set up my tote straps. I need my straps, my rivets and my D-ring and my leather washers. I like to start by setting up the stem end of my double cap rivet into all of my washers. Double cap rivets come in two parts. We have the side that has the post, and then we also have the cap here. These go together so this is one set making one rivet. I like to take the posts and just set them up into the washers as a first step. Also the leather washers have a right and wrong side. The right side of the washers tends to be smoother and the wrong side tends to be a little rougher so I put it in through the right side. I'm just putting all the posts in. If you bought this leather and hardware kit off our site or as part of the maker kit, it actually comes with one extra rivet in case you mess one up, you just have an extra one to work with. Now that I've set up all of my rivets into the leather washers, it's time to set those up into the bag. My favorite way to attach leather straps is to actually take the post of the rivet and stick it into the bag from the inside of the bag to the outside. I'm going to go ahead and set that up coming from the interior of the tote to the exterior of the tote. I like to do two at a time because then I can take a strap and lay that down on top of my rivet posts and then I want to connect a cap. Now you can connect the cap and click it into place and it's going to hold a little bit as you move your work around so you can finish making your tote. But it's not going to be strong enough to use as a finished tote until you actually set these rivets with a hammer or a mallet and a rivet setter or if you have an industrial hand press, you can use that. But I'm not going to set these yet because I have a moment here to set up all of my rivets, make sure that everything is set up correctly before I go and hammer it. If for some reason I go and set them up and they're not correct, it's really easy to just take the cap off and reposition my rivet or my strap if I need to. That's why I'm not hammering it yet. I'm going to go ahead and take two more posts and stick them into the bag from the interior to the exterior and then I'm going to take the other side of the same strap, remember, same strap, same side, and lay those over the posts and connect the caps. Now I'm actually going to flip my bag over and set up the strap on the other side too. This time I'm going to take a D-ring and place it in between the rivets before I connect the caps. I set up my posts. I'm going to put my leather strap on the top rivet here, click that in, then I'm going to take my D-ring and actually thread it onto my strap before I click the cap on to the bottom rivet there. That D-ring is just a really nice hardware feature that you can add to your strap. It's really easy. You just stick it on before you attach the rivet cap there, and then you can use it to hang your keys into one of your exterior pockets or hang any bling or thing you want off of your bag with that D-ring there. Let's go ahead and set up this last attachment point for our straps. Making sure my strap isn't twisted and I'm with the same strap on the same side of the bag. I'm going go ahead and click the caps on. Now I have a moment here with a strap setup, but not quite set to check and make sure that I set everything up correctly. I have the same strapped to the same side of the bag. I have my D-ring in there. I didn't forget that if you did super easy to just pop the cap off and stick it on. Then I have all my washers and this is ready to set. I'm going to be showing you two different techniques for setting the rivets. One with just a hammer and one with a rivet setter. The first thing you want to do is you want to make sure you're on a hard surface. This is a piece of quartz that I just got at a local counter top place and it's a really great hard surface to set rivets on. Now, I like to set my rivets from the interior when I'm setting them with a hammer to make sure that just in case I miss and dent a rivet, I'm denting a rivet on the inside of my bag. You can actually set your rivets with just a hammer and you don't need any other tool other than a hard surface. You also want to make sure your hard surface is on top of a table that doesn't have a lot of bounce because you really want to make sure when you're hitting your rivet to set it that there's a really good force transfer. The best way to set straight rivets is to actually start with a light to medium hit. As the rivet begins to set down, then you can hit it a little bit harder. But if you go in and start with really heavy hits, it could kick the rivet sideways and have it set crooked. Let's go ahead and set these. Now that I see it starting to set down, I can hit it a little harder. I know it's set when it indents into the leather there. Then I'll go ahead and set this one too. You can see there that those are nice and flattened. Now when there's a D-ring there, you want to make sure the D-ring is pushed out of the way. It was out of the way for the top rivet and now I'm going to actually going to flip it up and push it out of the way so I can set the bottom rivet. Now that's setting the rivets with just a hammer. Let me show you another technique, which is with a rivet setter and a mallet on a hard surface. These I'm actually going to set from the outside of the tote, pushing the other side of the tote out of the way. That's because with the rivet setter, there's a little bit of a concave end here and that concave end actually covers the rivet cap. That's what you put on the rivet there to set it and then you hit this with a mallet and it preserves the rounded look of the rivet cap. The same technique here applies. You want to start with light to medium hits and increase the force as the rivet starts to set. Also notice I'm using a mallet and not a hammer because this is a metal tool and I want to preserve the longevity of the metal tool and I also want to make sure that the force transfer is really effective. I get that with a mallet over a metal hammer on a metal tool. I can see that that's set because I could tell that the rivet is slightly indenting into the leather. I'm going to make sure nothing else is underneath the rivet except for the rivet on the stone here and then I'm ready to set this one too. This is really one of my favorite mallets to use. It has just enough weight in the head, but it's not so heavy that it's hard to swing and the face of the mallet is nice and hard so that it transfers the force effectively, but it's not so hard that it bounces off the tool. You never want to use a mallet that's like rubber or too soft in the head to set rivets, tubular or double cap because it just doesn't transfer enough force for your blow to really set the rivet effectively. Now all the rivets on my tote are set really strongly and I'm done making my overland tote.
17. CONCLUSION: Congratulations on your new Oberlin Tote. I hope you had a lot of fun making along with me. We covered zippers, French seam, far tag, rivets. We hammered things, we stitched things, we might have seen ripped things, but all in all, it's been really fun making with you, and I hope that you keep making the Oberlin Tote. You want to make it again, try it with one of our pattern customizations, add a little extra flair, build on the skills that you develop. I hope you're so proud of your tote that you made. Now go out, show your tote off to your friends. Don't be scared to brag about it and enjoy you bag.
18. SUPPLEMENTAL: Design Lab: The great parts about this skill share class is that you get to design a custom tote and make it too. There are some design parameters that go into this and I'm going to go over that now so as I explain all of the design considerations, previsualize in your head what your tote bag is going to look like. The first thing to consider is the look or the aesthetic of the tote bag, so what are some things that would influence the look or the aesthetic of your bag?There's color, texture, fabric choice like canvas or leather and also the features of your bag, so does it have an envelope base? Is it going to have leather straps or canvas straps with leather detail? Two outside pockets or just one? Those are all considerations for the look and the aesthetic. The fabric choice and the way that colors look next to each other can really go a long way into really shaping the look of the bag even if it's the same pattern. Two bags made out of the same pattern can look totally different with different types of fabrics and different prints on the fabric.The second design consideration is functionality.What will you be using the bag for? That's something that you can think about as far as would it be an every day bag?Would it be a bag that you would be carrying really heavy books in? Is it a grocery bag? A bag that stays in the car? If you think you're going to be using it heavily in everyday use and putting that down on the ground when you're sitting in classes or whatever, you might consider not using a light-colored fabric on the base. You also might consider using a heavier weight canvas if you feel like you're going to be carrying a lot of heavy stuff in the bag. [inaudible] last design consideration is going to be difficulty of construction so in this project you're going to design your bag but you're also going to make your bag so really think about what your skill level is. Ask yourself, what are some of the features of the bag that may be get easier or more difficult to make and what sewing skill level are you at. For example, if you are really new to sewing you might want to opt out of the inside zipper pocket and just focus on bag construction and not learning zippers.Or if you really want to challenge yourself, you might want to try it, setting the zipper in and just think about what's your skill level and design within your skill level. You can also change the sizing of the bag too. You can make it one inch narrower or one inch taller so that's some stuff that you can play around with to customize your tote bag.
19. SUPPLEMENTAL: Pattern Drafting + Cutting Fabric: I'm going to illustrate how to draft a pattern piece onto hardtack using the scrap piece of hardtack. First we're going to start with a reference line. We're going to draft the pattern piece for the inside pocket, which is 14 inches by nine and a half inches. Used a small L square to get a reference line in relation to the factory edge of the hard tack. Then I'm going to grab my 18 inch long ruler to continue that line. Now, I'm going to measure down nine and a half inches in a few different places. Then I'm going to draw a line that connects all of my marks. Then I connect all my lines and then I'm going to check my measurement again. I'm going to measure the beginning and the end of this line at 14 inches. I'm going to take my L square and lay it on the 14 inch long line to draft the corner. Then I can do the same for the other side and connect the sideline to the top line. One more bit of information is the grain line. We're going to cut this pattern on frame, then grab your paper scissors and cut your pattern out. You'll also need to add notches, which are the marks that indicate where to sew things when you're making your project. Right now we'll add a notch at one and a quarter inches. This will help us place the zipper in the right position when we're making our project. Then I'll cut the notch in a v shape with the apex of the v landing on the center of my notch. Now we're going to lay out our pattern and cut our pattern pieces. A few things to know about cutting, fabric has a warp and a weft and there are fibers that are woven perpendicular to each other. You're on grain when you're parallel to the salvage of the fabric, which is the factory edge of the fabric. You're also on grain when you're perpendicular to it too. This would be off grain when you're not in line with the warp or the weft of the fabric. If you're cutting something on a 45 degree angle to the grain, it's called cutting on the bias. We're going to lay out the main body piece, the base piece, and the inside pocket piece. There is a diagram in your instructions that also shows how to lay this out. If you are making style b of the tote bag and making fabric straps, you will lay one out here and one down here. We'll start with the one out here. Now we'll grab our clover chalk pen and mark our pattern pieces. I'm going to start by marking the pattern piece for the main tote, making sure that my pattern is laid on grain. After you're done tracing it, you can lift it up and make sure that you've got everything you need, then you can put your pattern piece aside and focus on your other pieces. Now I'm going to cut the base, then I can actually use the line from my main piece as one of the sides of my base pattern. Make sure you use an even pressure as you roll across your fabric with your rotary cutter. Then you can lift up your fabric by not, and not move your ruler to find out if you've cut all the way through and if not, you can go back over. Now we're going to cut the outside pockets and use a third of a yard of fabric, this is a medium weight Japanese printed cotton. We're just going to make sure since this fabric is directional and I want the tops of my triangles to point towards the top of the bag, I just want to make sure that I cut it in that way. These are the notches for the double fold at the top of the pockets, and so I want those to be at the top here. I also want to make sure that the triangle print is straight in relation to my pocket pattern. Our outside pockets, stay cut too, so we're going to cut them with the fabric folded in half the way that it comes on the roll. We're not going to open up the fabric to cut it like we did when we cut the canvas.
20. SUPPLEMENTAL: Style B: Construct Fabric Handles: If you're doing fabric straps, you're going to be cutting off the top three inches of your tote from both short ends, that's this mark here on your pattern. Now that we cut off the two pieces from the short ends, we'll take those to the iron and we'll do a half-inch single turn. Before we attach these straps to the tote bag, we going to have to sew them together to make them into straps. Since we are going to be sewing leather detail onto the straps too, so we'll grab our leather needles. We're going to use the edge stitch foot for sewing the straps together. Let me go to a stitch length of 3.5 stitch with the zero. Which side you take your needle over is going depend on which side you are sewing from. One side is folded and we're sewing these two sides closed right now. First thing we are going to do is find the middle of each strap and mark it. Marking the middle at 13.5 and the same on the other one. Then we're going to take our leather pieces here and there is a middle mark there. Now what you want to do is you want the side that you sewed to actually be on the side of the folded part of the leather and the open side of the leather should match up with the folded part of your strap. The reason is this is the folded part of the strap here, the single fold is thinner than over here you have four layers of canvas. I'm going to just go in and go ahead and clip and that in place. Since we're going to be sewing this brown leather, I'm going to go ahead and switch thread colors and then we'll go ahead and switch to leather needle. So the leather needle has a flat side on the back so you know which direction to insert it like all other needles. You can go all the way up until it stops and hold it in place while you tighten the wing there. We're going to use a teflon presser foot because then it lets the leather glide through. Sometimes the regular presser foot will stick to the leather and it won't feed the leather through. Now we're ready to sew. We're going to sew about an eighth of an inch away from the edge of the leather here. I'm going to go ahead and actually rotate my hand wheel and set my needle in manually to make sure that I can actually puncture through all of these layers. Now that I see that I didn't have that much resistance, then I can go ahead and start sewing. You want to stop a little bit before you get to the end and use the hand wheel to set your needle in and pivot when the needle is on its way up but still in the fabric. So all of that I was doing with my hand wheel, now I am going to lift my presser foot, pivot my work and put my presser foot back down. I'm noticing that I can pull my leather up a little bit so that it's actually flush with vice strap. Let's see that looks a lot better. You can start to see that bubble form again for the leather right there. So I am going to lift my presser foot and push it back down again. Just remember to put your presser foot back down when you do that. So we're getting close to the end here where I'm going to have to pivot. It's really hard to predict exactly where to stop sewing with your foot pedal. So I usually stop a little ahead of time and then I use my hand on the hand wheel to do the last few stitches so that I do my pivot in the place that I actually want it to be. Now, I want to pivot when my needle's on its way back up but still in the fabric, lift my presser foot, rotate, put my presser foot back down. Now that we've sewn both of our straps, we're going to go ahead and attach them onto the bags. We're going to mark the placement of the straps on the tote. So we want to mark the center mark here, half of 18 is nine. We want to mark seven inches apart. We'll put the ruler, the halfway mark on 3.5 inches and we'll mark zero and seven. Then we need to mark one inch on either side of those zero and seven marks for where this straps will go. Then we're going to take the strap and we're going to mark an inch and a quarter up from the end, the short end and that's how much it's going to hang over this edge. We're going to go ahead and pin that. So put my pin in far enough away that I don't have to take it out when I'm sewing so my presser foot won't hit it but I want to come around making sure that my strap isn't twisted. I'm going to mark an inch and a quarter up on this side and pin it. That mark that I made is flush with the raw edge of the body of the fabric there. Take my top rim facing that I cut off earlier and I pressed one side single fold and I want to put it on right sides together. I'm going to go ahead and pin that. So go ahead and prep both sides and then go to the machine and we'll sew this with a half-inch seem allowance. What we're working with is pretty large. We're going to go ahead and roll our work so that it's a little easier to handle. Go ahead and sew this top rim facing down. If you have a seem guide, you can go ahead and throw that on. Right now, we're just focusing on keeping the top rim facing and the body of the two raw edges flush. Now we're going to set the needle in and we're going to place our handle so that it is perpendicular to this raw edge here to make sure our handles are sewn in straight. So now you can take your pins out and we'll go to the other side and sew that down. Now, this bag is prepped at the point which if you're adding a magnetic snap, you would do that and also if you're going to put in an inside zipper pocket, you would do that before you sew this top rim facing down, but we're going to go ahead and take this to the iron and press this down and then we'll do a top stitch up here. But you won't do that top stitch until after you attach your magnetic snap if you're going to be doing that. So first you want to pin it in place and put your pins far enough away from the edge that they're not going to way when you're sewing this down. We're going to go to the machine and we are going to switch to an edge stitch foot and we're going to switch this down. But you can do a top stitch up here too, not necessary. It can be an aesthetic choice, but I think it finishes it nicely. Now we're going to add reinforcement boxes with X's in the middle on top of the straps here. They're not necessary, but they are nice reinforcement for the stress points here. I'm just going to go ahead and you can feel through where the straps are, make diagonal markings for the X. You're going to start on the bottom stitch, it's top stitch here, and then come up to here. With the needle set in, you want to pivot. I'm actually sewing on the strap and the bag and pivot this way. So go ahead and do that for all four.
21. SUPPLEMENTAL: Machine Basics: Overview: Welcome to the machine basics part of class where I'm going to explain everything that's going on with your sewing machine and get you really oriented and comfortable with the machine. We'll talk about all the different writing on the machine, what the different knobs do, how to thread it, and how to wind a bobbin, and then we'll also practice on some scrap fabric and get used to the machine. I'm going to just assume that you've never used a sewing machine before and we're taking it out of storage for the first time. The first thing that we're going to want to do is plug it in. The plug is also attached to the foot pedal. You have the plug, the foot pedal and then you plug it into the log. I'm going to plug it in here and then the off and on switch is right above that. When you turn it on, you'll see the light go on. This here is the stitch selector dial. Home sewing machines assumed that the sewer is making a variety of projects and using a bunch of different types of fabrics. A lot of these stitches on here are decorative and there also for certain types of fabrics and you can refer to your machine manual. This is the straight stitch here and it's the most common stitch. It's the stitch that will be on for the whole project. Now you'll also see a series of blue stitches next to the black stitches. Think of those like the Shift key and you can access another layer of stitches on the stitch length dial. It's a way for home sewing machines to fit in a lot of different stitches into a small amount of space. In order to access these blue stitches, you would go to the S1 part of the stich length dial. If I want to go back to a regular straight stitch, I would have to come off the S1 setting. Let's talk about the stitch length dial for a second. Stitch length is how far does the fabric travel before the needle goes back in the machine. Is it a really long stitch length or is it a really short stitch length? A common stitch length to start on is a stitch length of three. A larger stitch length is to four, and the shorter ones are closer to the one. This part here is four button hole and then all the way to zero. We'll go to a three and on a straight stitch, which is the setting that we will start on to test our machine. Now, let's come up here and talk about stitch width. The second most common stitch that you'll use is a zigzag stitch. You not only have to set your stitch length, but you also have to set your stitch width. How wide is your zigzag stitch? Now will come over here and talk about the needle position dial, and that's telling you that your needle is centered. You can see the needle jag over to the left, come centered and then jag over to the right. I'm going to move it back to center position because that's going to be our standard position for when we test out on a machine. Now right here is the thread tension dial. Now, anytime the thread is on the sewing machine it needs to be in tension. This is a way to adjust the tension. However, the tension comes factory set on your home sewing machines, and when the tension is off, the first troubleshooting thing that you do is actually check all of the places that you threaded your machine, and if you've threaded your machine correctly on the top thread and on the bobbin. A few other things that you're going to see in this area is our reverse lever. Now the reverse lever works when you hold it down, and then when you stop holding it down, you sew forward again. Unlike hand sewing where you actually tie a knot in the thread, on machines sewing, we do a few stitches forward and a few stitches back, and then we stitch our line. Then when we get to the end of our stitch line, we do a few stitches back and then forward again, and that acts as a knot so that our stitch doesn't come out in time. If there's actually two places to put a thread on your machine, and it depends on the type of thread that you're using. On home sewing machines because they're made to be portable, the thread stand for stacked thread goes up here, but it gets stored in this little storage compartment in your machine. Now most home sewing machines have a little storage compartment right here where you can store extra needles and bobbins and presser feet, but also threads stand. This just goes on right here. The threads stand here is actually for stack thread. Stack thread, you'll see is woven stacked on top of itself. It's designed to come off of the spool like this. This part is actually for a thread that's woven in a criss-cross shape. The correct way is that the thread is wrapping up and around from the back side. When you put that on, and then the correct way to put this back on is so that the smooth side goes against the thread there. Back here is a three-eighths of an inch seam allowance. Now, seam allowance is the space between the raw edge of the fabric and when the needle goes into the fabric. If my pattern goes for a five-eighths seam allowance, which is this line here, I would put the raw edge of my fabric up on the five-eighth seam allowance, and the measurement of where my needle goes in the fabric to the raw edge would be five-eighths. That's what seam allowance means. Now the other thing that you're going to see is these metal serrated teeth here and they're called the feed dog. The feed dog is what moves the fabric through the machine when you're operating the machine, and it moves in a circular motion, and it also will changes position when you hold the reverse down and you can watch that move back when I hold the reverse down, and then when I let the reverse go, then it moves back into the forward position. Now right here is the bobbin case. In order for a machine to function, it needs thread on the top and it needs thread on the bottom, and the way that it actually works is that it's the top thread and the bottom thread are making loops around each other and we'll look at that a little bit more later because it's important to understand the anatomy of the stitch, to understand the tension in the timing. This is a top loading bobbin and you can see the bobbin when it's in there. The reason that they develop the top loading technology so that you can tell if you're running that thread on your bobbin when you're sewing. You can just pop this off to take your bobbin out and to put it in. If you're ever hemming pants or a sleeve, you don't want to sew a shirt, and it rolls around this arm here so that you can hem your pants and not so them shut. Now, last but not least, and probably one of the most important things on the sewing machine is the presser foot. Presser foot has to be down when you're sewing. It's really important because when the presser foot's up, the tension disks on the top thread are open, your machine doesn't function properly if you sew with your presser foot up. Now, it's funny that the presser foot so important and the presser foot lever, you can't actually see when you're looking at the front of the machine. You actually have to reach your hand back and grab the lever and put it down. Now our machine is ready for us to wind a bobbin and to load the bobbin and to thread it.
22. SUPPLEMENTAL: Machine Basics: Understanding Threading + Bobbin: So now we're going to wind the bobbin. Grab an empty bobbin and it has a few spots here that the thread can go through, put it over here with the thread coming up and over. Now we're going to go ahead and thread it through the tensionner here from the front to the back. What I usually do, is I hold the back of the thread here so that I make sure that I'm really seeding into the tension disks. Then we're going to come through one of the holes in between the two plastic discs of the bobbin, and up and out. Now for some reason, it is counter-intuitive for people to come from in-between the plastic discs and up and out, and people want to come from outside the plastic discs and in. But if we actually did that, then we would have nowhere to wind our thread onto. Then we'll go ahead and put our bobbin onto the bobbin winder. We keep the bobbin winder over to the right. In order to make sure that the thread grabs onto the bobbin, we're going to have to hold the tail of the bobbin thread, for the first few revolutions until we feel like it's wind enough that when we cut off the tail of the thread, that it doesn't unwind off the bobbin. So I'll have to click the bobbin over to the left to be able to pull it off. Then I'm going to cut it off from the thread. Click that open, put that aside. Now it's really important to load the bobbin correctly, because if you don't load your bobbin correctly, then your machine won't work right. In the diagram here, it shows that the thread is unwinding counterclockwise to the left. It also shows that the thread is being pulled through two points here, and that's actually the tensionners for the bobbin. It's overstating it a little bit just so that you know what you're supposed to do. It has to be unwinding to the left or counterclockwise. So I'm going to hold the bobbin like this, so you can see that the threads coming off to the left or counterclockwise, and I'm going to drop it in here. Now, like we talked about before and like the diagram says, we're going to pull it through this slot here and just lay it back over here. What we're going to do is come in the first one here, slot here, which is labeled number 1, and then we're going to slip into 2. So number 3 here, is our threading down through here and that's the actual tensionner for the top thread. You can't see the tension disks in there because it's encased in plastic, but it will be similar to this. So you want to come down that. Now we're going to come up through this hook for 4. Now we need to thread around the take-up lever for 5 from the right to the left, like the arrow says. But the take-up lever disappears at certain revolutions and the stitch cycle. In order for the take-up lever to reappear, we need to take our hand over to the handwheel and rotate the hand wheel towards us until we see the take-up lever up here. You can rotate the handwheel, full revolutions towards you, and it's the same thing is making the machine so manually. Now we're going to rotate the handwheel so that we see the take-up lever up here. Then we're going to thread the take-up lever from the right to the left like the diagram says. You want to come down here through 6. You have to thread behind six and it's hard to see the opening of this and it is to the right. So I usually say, hold your thread like floss and floss up and down into the right. Now you also need to thread through the needle bar guide, which I also say it's good to hold your thread like floss and floss up and down through the right. On some machines, you might be entering it from the left and then you go through the eye and the needle from the front to the back. Then slip under the presser foot. Pick the top thread, and hold it with our left hand. Then we want to take our right hand over to the handwheel and rotate a full revolution. And then you start to see the loop of thread come around there. Now I'm going to pull my top thread with my left hand, and then you're going to see that loop come up through that hole. Now I'm going to grab a tool and I'm just going to swipe it through, and it's going to swipe the bobbin thread up through the hole there. Then I'm going to check my tensions and make sure that my thread is not obstructed and that it feels like there's tension on the thread as I pull on it. It feels good, so I'm going to go ahead and replace my bobbin cover. This is a bottom loading bobbin. First you take off this part here to access the bonding case. Open this, pull this lever here to access the bobbin. [inaudible] your bobbin, so it's unwinding like in number 6 here. Then you want to hold your bobbin case so that the slit in the metal that the thread goes through is facing up. Then you want to put your bobbin in, hold it in place with your thumb, pull the thread through the slit so that it clicks into place. You can sometimes hear that click. Now it's in the tensionner. Then I usually pull it and make sure that the thread is not obstructed and then I feel little bit of resistance, which means that it's in the tensionner. Now we want to flip our bobbing case over and load it into the machine. Now, this metal piece here that sticks up out of the bobbing case, should be facing up. Part of the bobbin case here, fits into this cutout here. Put it in until you hear the click. Then it's seeded in all the way. Then pull your thread, make sure you still feel tension.
23. SUPPLEMENTAL: Machine Basics: Sewing Techniques: I went ahead and prepared a sample piece of fabric with some chalk lines on it so we can practice some techniques for sewing. Now that we have our machine properly threaded, and our top thread is under the presser foot, and we're going to want to be on a straight stitch, a stitch length of three, a stitch width of zero and our needle position centered. The first thing we're going to do, is just put the presser foot down. The best place to start your fabric is slightly behind the needle. The reason is that you want to make sure enough of your fabric is going to be pressing down on the feed dog to actually pull through the machine. So I'm going to put my presser foot down and then I'm going to just go ahead and sew. Because I want you to practice when you're sewing, just practice making your machine go really fast and then also practice trying to make your machine goes slow as possible. Now we're going to press the foot down really gently and see if we can make the machine sew as slow as possible. So one of the techniques that you'll develop as a stitcher, is to really control the speed of the machine and get to know that the machines response time and the machines response speed in relation to how much pressure you put down on the foot pedal. Now we're getting close to the end of our fabric here and it's really hard to predict exactly when to stop sewing with the foot pedal. Usually what I'll do is I'll stop sewing with the foot pedal a little bit early on, and then if I want to stop sewing exactly at the very end of my fabric, then I can actually walk my hand wheel and manually sew the last few stitches. That's one way for me to really control when I'm going to stop sewing. Then I'm going to lift my presser foot and pull my workout. Then I'm going to go ahead and cut my threads on my thread cutter there. Now we're going to practice a few other things. I want you to practice doing a reverse stitch in the beginning and the end of your stitch. Now, I'm going to start this stitch, and so I'm going to sew a couple of stitches and then I'm going to hold reverse down and sew a couple of stitches back. Then I'm going to proceed to sew my line. For hand positions, there's a few things that you can do. You can put both your hands on top of the fabric right in front of the presser foot, or you can grab the front and the back of the fabric and sandwich your hand around it and then put one hand here, but these are some of the common hand positions that you would use. Now, also keep in mind that the job of your hands is to direct the stitch that you're doing and it's to make sure that your stitch is on the line that you want it to be. Your hands don't necessarily control the speed of sewing, that's the job of your foot on the foot pedal. What you're always looking for with your hand positions, is to get the greatest amount of control as possible, so that you feel the most confident in the stitch that you're sewing. Now we're getting close to a pivot points, and a pivot is when you change directions. I'm going to show you the correct way to do a pivot. We're going to sew with our foot pedal, up to the pivot point but it's hard to predict exactly where to stop sewing with your foot pedal, so then you can stop sewing with a foot pedal and take your right hand to the hand wheel and walk the hand wheel a few revolutions until you come up to the point that you wanna pivot. Now, the best place to pivot is when the needle's in the fabric and on its way back up. So now you can see that the needles in the fabric and it's on its way down. I'm still rotating it the hand wheel towards me. The needle's still on it's way down and now it's on its way back up, but still in the fabric. That's when you list the presser foot, rotate your work and then put the presser foot back down. Now you want to make sure you rotate with your needle in the fabric because the needle axes the pivot point, and we're going to keep sewing, and we're going to stop a little bit before our pivot. Use your hand wheel to rotate. So the needles in the fabric and on its way back up, that's when we'll lift the presser foot, put their presser foot down and then sew the [inaudible] If my work doesn't come out easily, then I can just take my right hand to the hand wheel, rock it back and forth as I pull my workout, and it just resets the stitch and lets my work go easily. It's a good habit to get into. When you look at a stitch, what you really see is the stitch in between the points where the needle enters the fabric. You see that thread on the front and the back. But the actual magic of the stitch happens in between the layers of fabric. The sewing machine is designed to hide these loops in between the two layers of fabric because that's the strongest stitch. So when we talk about tension on the machine, what we're talking about is getting the right tension so that these loops are hidden. So not only do you need a specific tension, dynamic tension between the bobbin thread and the top thread, you also need a particular timing of when the eye of the needle comes down and the hook of the bobbin comes around to hook into the eye of the needle. So tension and timing are the two main things that are really keeping this machine functioning optimally. So let me talk about how this really relates to beginning sewers. If the presser foot is up and you're going to sew, you're actually not clamping your fabric down on the feed dog and pushing it through. If you go to sew and you forget to put your presser foot down, two things are happening. You're sending a really big loop down underneath to loop the bobbin and you're not advancing your fabric through. So you're sending a really big loop of fabric down into the same place over and over again, and it becomes this really big mess of a fabric and you end up with this rustiness of thread that you have to cut out of your bobbin. So if there's one thing to remember as a beginning sewer, when you go to start sewing, remember to put your presser foot down before you start your stitch.
Ellie Lum, Sewing Instructor, Bag Maker, Klum House
