How to make a lined zippered pouch

How cute is this, even if I do say so myself.  This is my first sewing project and I am soooooo pleased with it.  I know if you look closely (or may be not so closely) you will see the lace trim isn't straight but that's mainly because when I cut the fabric I didn't do a great job.


It really was pretty easy to do, well if I managed to do it having zero experience with a sewing machine anyone can.  This is not a full tutorial as so many people have done great ones but I'm going to tell you about my first sewing experience and what I did (and yes the mistakes I made).

I chose to use a 7" zip but you can do your pouch any size you want and with or without additional embellishments such as the lace and ribbon trim I used.  It did make me laugh that this should apparently take around 10 minutes and I spent most of the day making mine!

I was really nervous initially as I didn't want to spoil my lovely fabric and lace. I read a few of the sewing tutorials and practiced doing some sewing  in straight lines and going round a corner on some scrap I had.  I then dove right in and got cracking on making my pouch.

Here a couple of the tutorials I checked out:

http://www.tillyandthebuttons.com

Tilly has some great easy and more complicated tutorials on here, I used this to get me started with my sewing machine.

http://seekatesew.blogspot.co.uk
http://www.designmom.com,

I used these two for the zippered pouch tutorial.

As I am a complete novice and the way my little brain works I found it difficult to use just the blog tutorials.  I needed to watch someone do it, so I scooted over to You Tube to see what videos I could find.  There are tons of video tutorials on there but the one below by a lady called Debbie Shore is my favourite.  It was clear, easy to watch and follow and I like the fact she didn't spend ages rabbiting on about this and that before she got stuck into the tutorial.  Her very large but cute dog also makes an appearance which did make me chuckle.

I did make a few mistakes making my pouch and had to unpick what I'd done a couple of times. One of the problems I had was not having a decent pair of scissors, I was using a pair of not very sharp decorating scissors.  Between them and my bad skills the fabric I cut wasn't completely straight.  The first time I unpicked my stitches I ended up putting everything together the wrong way round to the zip so had to unpick it all again.  Making mistakes in a way is a good way to learn because in my next project I will double check things more before I start sewing as unpicking things is a tad tedious.

Adding the lace trim

• I cut the fabric pieces and pinned the lace trim in place on the correct bit of fabric which would end up being the front of my pouch and stitched the lace to it. 

• I then stitched along 2 places, the top of the lace and again below the bottom of the ribbon just above the scalloped edge which held it in place nicely.

• When  I stitched the side of the pouch together I tucked the ends of the lace in to so they were hidden by the seams and it was all nicely finished.  

I'm not sure how well I've explained that, it would of helped if I'd have taken some pictures of this part to show you what I mean.

So things I've learnt apart from obviously how to make a zippered pouch:

I was quite impressed that I managed to fit a zipper on my first sewing project and plan to do a few more similar projects because its a great way to practice your sewing skills and you get cute little make up bags/purses or whatever you want to use it for out of it.