The Guild decided to spend some of our money and our project was to make and fill cosmetic bags for our women’s shelter. I’m not a fan of making bags and I’m certainly not a fan of zippers but it was for a good cause so I decided to participate.

We were working from a very old pattern and at some point it was decided that there needed to be a demo for those people who were having problems. I thought I should get a start on the bag before the demo and I was only at step 2 (the zipper) before I had issues. So off to the demo I went.

I took photos and when I tried again at home everything went reasonably well until it was time for the lining. My bag was about half the size of what it should be. I chatted with a guild member at one of our swims and she suggested I had perhaps sewn the zipper onto the wrong side. Another look at the pattern and my small bag and I realized that was the issue.

So I bought another zipper (two more actually just in case) and started again. Things worked better this time but I had major issues with the lining. It was much too large for the size my bag came to but I wasn’t about to start over so I stuffed it inside and sewed it by hand.

Never again! The pattern wasn’t very clear on directions, both of the ladies handling the demo had different methods and neither of them matched the pattern directions.

Done is done – not pretty and really not very well done but …

Needless to say my idea of making these as Christmas gifts for my granddaughters went out the window!