HOW TO SEW - JAPANESE KNOT BAG - 3 PATTERN SIZES

Hello, I'm Crafty Patty. Thanks for tuning in to watch how to make a Japanese knot bag. I'm going to be showing you small, medium, and large patterns with all the measurements. I will also be showing you how to do a gusset bottom or you can make a round bottom. We're going to make the pattern with you. I'm going to be going step by step. It's a full tutorial. All my videos are on the long side because I take you step by step so you can make one for you. So keep watching. I'm not going to write down all these supplies. I'll put those in the description so I'm not gathering on. But the main items I want you to use are definitely a very sharp rotary cutter blade and your cutting board and your ruler. Those for me are the must when working on this project. All right, let's get to it. For the large bag, I've added 14 inches so you can wear it over the shoulder or 35.56 centimeters. So for the large, once you've got that tucked through, then you can just bring this over your shoulder and wear it like so. And if you don't want the over the shoulder, then what I like to do is your short handle will be half the size of your long handle. And so for this bag here, for a medium-sized bag, you'll have more of a look like this and you'll wear it like that. And here's the little 10-inch bag all finished, nicely pressed. And again, long handle goes in and there's your darling little bag. You can use your brown wrapping paper for your pattern, but if you're going to make the large one with the large long handle, you might want to get yourself a roll of wrapping paper from the dollar store because that will be nice and long for you and that will fit your pattern piece. This is where it might make a bit more sense to you where I said that you can make this any size you want. So when I start my pattern, I start with a square. This particular one is 16 long and 16 wide. That was for my large. Medium, I made it 14 inches long and 14 inches wide. For the small, I've done 10 inches and 10 inches. So you can make it any size you want, and then I'll explain how to work out your handles. So let's start making our pattern. I'm going to be demonstrating with using the small pattern today, and as you can see, I've written in here that it's 10 by 18, or here's your centimeters. So I've cut a piece of paper that's 10 inches by 18 inches. Okay, so remember how I've talked about the square? Here's our 10 inches, and I'm sorry if I'm not talking in centimeters, but I do have the written out on the pattern. So here's my 10 inch mark on my board. So let's just draw an imaginary line across. I'll just draw it in, and now we have our 10 inch square. The next thing we're going to be doing is we're going to take off an inch from each of these sides. This will create the nice roundness for the strap, and if you do have a omni-grid ruler and a cutting mat with the grids and lines on it, it makes it so much easier. So we've now got our one inch mark, which I've measured up from here and to the bottom, and I'm just going to draw a line down to my 10 inch imaginary line on each side. And your next step is to measure in three inches on this side and three inches for this side, or that would be 7.62 centimeters. So let's draw in our line on this side here and three inches on this side, not counting your one inch, just one, two, three, and there's our three inches. Now to round your corners, just grab whatever you've got. If you've got a compass grade, if you've got a little cup, glass, dish, I just happen to have a roll of tape here. So I'm just going to come in and I'm going to round this inside portion, and I'm just matching up this line and my other line and just drawing through. Don't just do what I just did. That's not quite what I wanted to do. So you want to have it so there's a bit of a bottom on the reading here. So I'm just going to bring that roll just a little closer in and draw it to about there and the same on this side. Matching up this side of course, but pulling down this further down and don't worry about the exactness of it because what we're going to do, these are not good, we're going to take this and we're going to round this when we fold it in half, so no worries. So as I said, I was told you to cut this at 18 inches, so this longer strap is actually eight inches or 20.32 centimeters, and as a general rule when you're making this size of handle you don't want the over the shoulder handle. We're going to make this twice as long as the short handle. So being this is eight inches, this one is going to be four inches. So just let's come down four inches and let's draw through a line. This particular handle I made four and a half because I just wanted that little bit extra to make it easier to pull through, but I'm going to make this one four because it is a smaller bag. Now there's two ways you can do your bottom. You can do with the gusset, which is what this is, makes a nice flat bottom, or you can just round off your bottom like this. So your choice. I'm going to show you both ways sewing. This top portion is identical to how you sew it together and the only difference is you're sewing right around and this one you'll be making the gusset. So if you want to do a round corner then just grab a plate or whatever you have and just round your corners like so. Again leaving the flatter bottom like I should have on the upper portion of this for the straps and you just round off your corners. If you want to do a gusset like this then all you do is you're going to cut out a one inch square on the bottom. Now your gussets can be any size you want. If you make a one inch gusset this portion will be two inches. If you make it one and a half it will be three inches. If you make it two this will be four. So on this pattern piece I'm going to show you how to do the gussets. So we're going to just measure out an inch here and an inch here and we'll just close it off and make our little squares like so. So you decide which type of bag you want to make gusset or just the rounded bottom and like I was saying you want to round this corner a bit. So from here you're rounding it up to here because we're going to cut this out. So let's just come in and place whatever you have and just round this off a bit like so and the same for the other side. Just rough that in. Now this part here you don't want it to be a real sharp point so you do want to have this sort of more like this. So bring that in about half an inch and let that round a little bit more here. More like that. But we're going to fix that when we fold this in half. You now come in with your paper scissors and I want to come in so it's a little bit flatter. I don't want it to be a real sharp point here because that's going to be really hard to sew around. So you want to make this more rounded and then bring it up like so and then come all the way up and cut that out. And again like I was talking about I'm just going to come in here now make a nice gradual curve and then flatten it out to the middle. Turn this around the other side so you don't see all my scratch marks. Now that's got a little bit of a point on it so I'm just going to take that point out just that little bit more and flatten that out just by cutting in just a titch more. This will just help you to make the sewing process a bit easier when you get to the sewing area. So now the last step is to cut off your short strap and that gets cut off. You've now made your pattern and you can see how the lines here that I drew in I haven't cut to them but I wanted to make sure that both sides were matched up nicely and that's the main concern. And there's your two options for any size bag. You can do that on any of them, round your corners or do your gussets. So fabric. I like to use 100% cotton and this has been pre-washed. All my fabrics are pre-washed and this particular piece is cut at half a meter or that would be about 19 inches. I tell you I suck at metric even though I live in Canada but I guess I'm old and I'm still living in the yards. Anyways, I try to say both for you because I know all over the world they use a different system. Mostly metric but I'm old school so I can get two of these. If your fabric hasn't shrunk too much you might be able to get two on half a meter or 19 inches. If not then of course you can always go this way and you've got leftover to make another bag and I've got another bag coming up after this video so keep watching for that one. If you are wanting to make the large bag with the longer strap then I would suggest just buy yourself a meter of fabric and then you've always got leftover to make that next bag I'm going to be showing you how to make. So again one meter or one yard would be 39.37 inches. These bags are reversible so whatever you've got on the inside that can be flipped out and that becomes a bag for the other side. So do consider when you're buying fabrics of something that will complement because you do see a little bit on the handles and whatnot. Now I do have a meter of fabric. I'm not worried about having excess because I am going to be making other bags like I said. So again pre-washed fabric, iron if necessary. Think about your placement of fabric. If you want your pattern going this way then you're going to place it that way. If you want it to be this way then make sure you're placing it this way. All righty with right sides together really smooth that out because we're going to be cutting four layers at once here. Here's my lining or it can be outer fabric because it is reversible. Here's my next two layers that I've folded my fabric in half with the right sides together placing it right on top of the lining or the outer fabric. Really smooth that out. Make sure there's no bumps or buckled fabric underneath because that will not be good. The whole reason for cutting four at once is for accuracy so your bag gets sewn together much easier. Now I actually have a little bit of a pattern in this fabric so I'm just gonna waste a little bit of material there and just move it over so I've got this one panel of flowers right down the middle of the bag like so. Now just go ahead and pin that all on and going through all four layers just lift it up a little bit guide it through with your finger you'll be able to get it through and go all the way around pinning close to the edge because that will help when you use your rotary cutter. If you don't want to over cut you can come into your little gussets with your sewing scissors and cut out your corners. There's your pattern cut out. I'm just going to turn it upside down just for now so you can see what I'm doing and we're not going to take out our pins but we're going to put the pins back in the tops of our handle while we've got it all nicely marked up together here. So we're just taking our two pieces of fabric that are either for our lining or outer and pin those together. This is going to be the first thing we sew on the sewing machine and pin these together and the same for the other side. Take off the rest of your pins to remove your pattern and now we're all ready to take this to the sewing machine and I'm going to be using a 3 8 inch seam allowance or that would be 0.95 centimeters and let's go sew that together. Then again I'm going to make 3 8 of an inch seam allowance starting back stitching and away we go and back stitch and when I get to the end here I'm going to bring up my next top of my strap. I'm going to let that go into the presser foot. Just keep sewing until it catches the next one. There it is. Back stitch and away we go again and the same with your lining. The next one and back stitch and the last one. That saves a little bit of thread and you can just trim them in between. Now what I want you to do is just come in with all those seams and just use your fingers to do a finger pressing and press those all open. Just the heat of your thumbs and fingers will do the job or you can take it to the ironing board if you wish but that'll work and do all four seams. Okay so you've sewed your top of your straps and now what we're going to do is place the right sides together matching up the short handle with the short handle and the long handle with the long handle. There's the short and there's the long. Now we're going to be sewing the inside circle. Now you're going to want to match up your lining seam and your outer seam. Make sure it's nicely matched up and you're going to pin so the heads of the pin are in the center. Pin your two seams first. Now with any project it's best that you start to pin in the middle and then pin in between those pins. So I'm just matching up my ends here and I've got a pretty good idea of where my middle is here. So again let's place a pin right here and now what I like to do is when I'm working with a lot of fabric like this, even though this is the reason we've cut all four pieces together so you'd have accuracy, this is where it counts. But just in case I pull these two pieces of fabric and then I grab the middle and that's where I'll pin just in case there's any excess fabric that's going to bunch up on you but it shouldn't because we've made our cuts exactly the same for the inner and outer fabrics and just pin in between. And to start sewing I'm going to be working on the left side here so I can sew on the right side. So let's just tuck that under our presser foot. Again line up for our 3 8ths of an inch and for me it makes it nice and easy because I can just follow along and match up the outside of my presser foot with the outside of my fabric. When I get to my curve I'm watching the edge of my presser foot and the edge of the fabric and I'm watching that and I'm pulling it along so this stays the same. I use my fingers just to guide it around like this to get around my curve. Continue sewing around and we're back to the start. We'll take that off. I'm going to go we're going to clip some seams and do some pressing. You'll want to clip in this area so when you go to turn it it lies nice and flat. So just come in with some sharp scissors and you're going to clip up to the sewing line but not into it. And that will give it some ease for when we turn it and the same for the other side. Pressing is your friend on this type of sewing. So if you press and open up all your seams when you go to do your top stitch it's going to be so much easier for you. So just come in and give it a nice pressing all the way around. Oh and everybody always asks what have I got on my iron? It's a Teflon cover and I've had it on for oh my gosh probably over 30 years or more. I just never take it off. It's meant for delicate fabrics and it just glides really nice over the fabric and so I just never bother taking it off. It just works really well. And once you've pressed all the way around on the top then your lining or outer, this doesn't matter because it's either or because it's a reversible bag, but let's just say I want to push this one to the center. We'll just push it all in like so and now we're going to press all the way around so we've got the nice edges together like so and around you go. Because you've done a great job of pressing you shouldn't need pins and let's go and insert our needle between one quarter and one eighth of an inch and on my sewing machine I've got a little guide in here a little notch that I watch myself as I go around. So again backstitch and away you go and when you get to your corner I just use my fingers to make sure I've pulled my fabric nice and smooth and then around we go. Your next step is now to place right sides together for your lining. These will go together pinning along the bottom edge and along the side. It can match up a little curve up here. going to do exactly the same thing with the outer fabric. So here's the outer pieces, here's my bottom, here's my bottom, bring the two bottoms together. We're going to be starting right up at the edge here on the curve. Again three eighths of an inch seam, sewing down, stop. Then we're just going to come over here, start our sewing here and the end and stop and then up the other side and the same with the lining. All right so here I am at my right curved edge and three eighths of an inch and backstitch all the way to the end and backstitch. Now what I'm going to do is just lift up my presser foot, pull out a bit of thread and just turn this around and keep going. It saves a little bit of time and backstitch and to the other end. Lift up the needle and the presser foot, pull out a bit of more thread, turn it around and let's start on the other edge and the same for the lining. Now we can just trim the threads in between our little gusset cutouts and now we're going to make our fun gussets. So here's our little cutout that we have. We're going to open this up and we're going to match up the seam with this seam, the seam with the seam. That doesn't sound quite right. We're going to match up our seams. Okay so let's go this way so you can see. I'm going to press over one way with my seam and this way the opposite way on the other one and you're just going to use your fingers just to smooth out the fabric so it's nice and flat and once you've got it nice and flat then you're going to pin it in place. I'll just show you again with this one. Again pull out those little corners, turn, match up your seam allowances, push one to one side, push the other to the other side and then just play around with the fabric so it's nice and flat. Get it nice and even and pin in place and continue with the other ones for your lining. Once you've got all four pin we're ready to sew them. Let's start with this one now that we're here and again 3-8 inch seam allowance and we'll just sew straight across starting at the corner and straight through. Backstitch and again like before I've done one. Why not grab the next one which is right here and do the same thing as before. You can let that go. This is nerve-wracking for you, don't do it, but it works for me so I like to do this. It just saves me a bit of time so again I'll just let this catch, backstitch and sew to the end and here's another one. What I do want you to watch though is I've pulled my seam this way on this side of the end of the bag so I want to do the same on this side. I'm just going to reverse this one and we're going to push it the other way and that will just allow for it to lie a lot flatter on the bottom of your bag because if you go to press it now this will all be on the same side. Let's go back and finish this one. I've got this one folded this way and so I've got to change that up again and I want to fold it so it's the same way. I'm just going to change that and there we go. Our gussets are done. Remember I gave you two options. You could either do the gussets or you could do the rounded bottom so we've done the gussets. At the same stage you'd be doing the same thing with this one if you want the rounded bottom so just like we did on the other one we took our fabrics and we put right sides together and we pinned it all together and again you can start by matching up underneath where the curve is and that can be your first pin and then bring it down to your corner and pin and around you go for pinning and do the same for the lining. You're going to do the same thing you did on the other bag. Start at your curve but this time you get to sew all the way around and up to the top and stop and do the same with your lining sew around and up to the top. On to the next step and both steps once you've done the sewing of the bottom of the bags your next step whether it's gussets or rounded bottom will be exactly the same for your top handles. So here we go we've got both our gussets done you're going to come in find your larger handle this is your shorter one here's your larger one and then just go inside here and grab that fabric and pull it right side out till the lining and the outer is to the right side just pull it all out then your inner fabric just goes and tucks right inside and then we just smooth it out use your fingers to push out the gussets and there you've made your little boxed bottom with the gussets that you need for the lining and the outer fabric and now what we're needing to do is we need to sew around these areas here and that'll be the finish of our bag so we need to go to our ironing board and we're going to press under each of these edges three-eighths of an inch and at this point in time you might find it easier just to open these up so you can get in there and press it and pull them out and then fold it over and if you're not good at eyeballing three-eighths then these little sewing ruler guides work great just put your little red guide up there and then you can push it along and up against the edge of fabric and this edge will tell you if you're on three-eighths or not and they work great i use them all the time so go around and press in your three-eighths of an inch you can look inside to see what side you've pressed your seam to and it's going this way so i'll do the same up here make sure it's pressed over to the right side and do the same with the other side so the trickiest part of this whole bag will be just sewing around this curve right here and we're top stitching this to close this our handles up to finish it so a little trick you've got to be careful is this is your side seam here right and this is where you're going to turn under the top stitching i want you to come in very carefully but only cut up to half of that just enough to give it a little bit of ease so i'm going to come in and i'm only going to cut up about oh just less than quarter of an inch just on that corner and that will help you to sew that around when you turn that under do the same with the lining same thing you can see where you where you pressed here's your press line so i'm going to come just halfway up to that i don't want to go all the way up on this one it's just enough to give it a little bit of ease to help us for sewing okay so now you're just going to go around patching up our seams pinning in place go all the way around now is a good time to come in and get your side seams together like i said before this is the trickiest part of the whole bay here's my side seam there's my side seam let's get those put together and now you can come in and just ease these together just work it around so it's nice and smooth make sure you haven't caught any fabric in the back and do the same for this side and then once you get close to that corner again just work in there with your fingers and give it a little pull smooth it out so both of them are nice and flat and together and then if you need to come back and do one more adjustment in here make sure it's nice and smooth and no puckering and put your pins back in making sure that there's no doubling over on the other side and you're good to go and do the same for the small handle pulling it out again like i showed you iron it around your 3 8 inches putting them together and smoothing out this corner here matching up this first and then pinning them together once you've got it turned and pressed under another little tip when you're top stitching like this you really want to make sure that you're catching the back fabric so when you're pinning it together have it so you can just see that back side does that little bit more than the top therefore when you're going around the top stitching you know you're catching that back side because it's really a drag if you go all the way around then you look on the other side and go oh i missed it that's not good so do that and that will save you some grief if you've got an attachment that you can take off that will work easier for getting around your larger handle but being that this one is made at a four inch not four and a half it will not fit over this you can slip it over your end i find the easiest way to sew a small opening like this when you're top stitching is i want to sew on the side so i'm just going to flip this like so okay like that and then i'm gonna put that underneath my presser foot and lift that up and now i've got a nice area i can see what i'm doing and i'm not pulling and yanking on it to try to see where i'm at so now i'll just put my needle in where i want to start again one quarter to one eighth away from the edge i'm going to back stitch and i'm going to work my way around this curve now right up to my needle pressing down this wall nice and flat using my fingers to pull up the so it stays nice and flat and when i get to this point when i get to my side seam this is a pressure point so i'm going to go back and forth a few times here so it's nice and strong so let's go back and forth that should do it just enough to reinforce that edge and again using your fingers to work your fabric so there's no bumps anywhere and work around the curve and take it out and just check your back lining and make sure that you did indeed catch all of the material on the back side and i've just inspected and looks like i'm good so same for the bigger one the bigger one will be easier to do so i showed you the little one and the bigger handle you can go right over top again one eighth to one quarter and around you go try to make sure that you caught all your edges and if you're good now you're ready to give it a pressing and you'll be all finished and just with your hands get in there and smooth out the lining and then find your tops of your seams and that's where you in the middle and give it an iron let me bring it back again and there we have it complete the darling little bag and there you go big handle through the little handle and onto the arm it goes and there's your cute little bag and it's reversible there we go two bags in one lots of uses for your japanese knot bag this one i'm using for my groceries i've got my knitting in this one and this is the perfect little size for a quick little shopping trip notice i put a bag in the bag and my cell phone and then i'm off to the store everything's there ready to go i hope you enjoyed thanks so much for watching and stay tuned because i've got another bag video coming up soon bye