My Sewing Space

Earlier this week I made sixteen small terry cloth drawstring bags for holding bars of soap or soap slivers ( more here ).  M sells these in her shop.  She calls them "soap socks." I really like the names she comes up with for the things I make.

Fifteen terry cloth bags for bar soap or soap slivers, ready for the shelves.... For the first time, I used my 1/2" bias tape maker for the casings.  I was pretty impressed with how well it worked.  I love a good sewing tool. I think it will take me as long to clean up all the lint, fuzz and snippets from this project as it did to make them all.  Terry cloth is a messy fabric. Work in progress: Back to work...

Today I picked up an inexpensive washcloth to try out the soap bag in terry cloth.  I don't think there is much difference in the cost of materials between this one and the knitted one , but the amount of time it takes me to make one is pretty different.  This was a very quick project, yet I prefer the knitted one. I used purchased bias tape on the outside of the bag to make the casing.  This could certainly be done with a more decorative fabric or coordinating tape, but this happened to match so well I thought I would use it.  It was hard for me to decide about putting the casing on the inside or the outside, but in the end I thought the outside could use a little "something" and didn't really know what else to do with it. A plain white satin ribbon serves as the drawstring.  Again, could be more decorative, but I was working with what I had.  For the drawstring opening, I turned under the ends of the tape and then stitched it down before sewing th...

The second item that the shop owner wanted is a little bag to hold a bar of soap or soap slivers that is also used like a washcloth.  She mentioned maybe doing them out of terry cloth, but I couldn't find that in the fabric store here.  I thought knitting one would work just as well and maybe better as it could stretch to fit different size bars of soap. The yarn is 100% cotton - not my favorite to knit with, but likely the best for this purpose.  It is worsted weight and I knit it on size 3 needles as I wanted it to start out firm with just a little stretch.  When it is wet, it will stretch more.  I don't get so excited about seaming knits, so this is knit in the round from the top down and the bottom is closed with a three-needle bind off.  I love the way seed stitch looks and thought the texture would be a good thing for this, so that's what I did for the whole bag, except for three rounds.  One round of knit above an eyelet row, then the ey...