I'm linking to the A Lovely Year of Finishes June Finishes Party.

This week was the end of the year for The Boy's first year of preschool. Oh man, time flies! He had a great year and has wonderful teachers and staff to thank for his great experience.

I had been thinking about what to do for end of the year teacher gifts and couldn't decide. Then I was over on Berry Barn Designs at the end of May and saw Sarah's Terrific Teacher Gifts post. Of course, it hit me! I could make teacher gifts! Why hadn't I thought of this before?

Now I've only worked with zippers on a couple small projects a few years ago, so I wasn't really up for that. Instead I decided to make more of Jeni Baker's adorable Lined Drawstring Bags. I made a set of 5 bags last year. The Boy loved them and I allowed him to keep one for his matchbox cars. I figured we could use 1-2 more around here for toys. Plus six for the Primary teachers at school and one more for The Boy's gymnastics teacher. Okay, I'll make 10, I decided. This was my primary June Goal with a time-sensitive deadline of June 11 (the last day of school). I'm so pleased to have gotten it all done on time!

The bags go together pretty quickly and the instructions in the free tutorial are great. I think I'll purchase the Lined Drawstring Pattern with 8 sizes and make some larger ones next.

I pulled 40 fat quarters from my stash for these. It sure feels good to do some stash-busting. I pulled the initial 3 fat quarter groupings and got to work. Pro tip: If you're gonna do a bunch of pieces at once, assembly line style and you haven't made the pattern for a while, make just one at first, so you don't make the same mistake ten times. :-) Thankfully, it wasn't anything too major. Basically I was using non-directional prints for the main exterior pieces, so I could have cut them as a single piece, but I cut two, then had to piece and press those seams, etc. Ten times. I could have saved a little time there.

As a time saving measure I was going to use ribbon for the drawstrings, but I was having issues with the ribbon unraveling and failed to read the "use fray check" part of the directions (oops) so I ended up pulling more fabric do make the drawstrings. I do like the look of the fabric drawstrings better, so overall I'm happy with that outcome, though it certainly takes more time. Tuesday night was a late night. ;-)

Working assembly line style, I cut everything and worked through the whole pile one step at a time. This was my first pile, attaching the linings to the outer accent fabrics.

I chain stitched while piecing to save time and thread.While making the drawstrings, I ironed them all before stitching the lengths.

 

In the interest of saving a little bit of time, I marked my machine with tape for the last two lines of stitching. This saved me the time of marking the fabric on ten bags. A great time saver for assembly line style piecing.

 

The Finished Bags

 

Part of the reason I like the drawstring bags for toys is the easy cleanup aspect. For The Girl's birthday she got this cute Green Toys Build-A-Bouquet set. It even came with a box to keep the 44 pieces in. This is what it looks like when the kids put it away.

Notice how they don't quite fit. I've tried to put them away myself... sometimes I do no better than the kids. After many attempts, this was my result.

Tada! But this is NEVER going to happen from a 2- or 4-year old. So... voila! Drawstring bag!

 

Since I was working from fat quarters, and using a large portion of some of them I took some time to pre-cut my leftover fabric. Inspired by Lori's post How I Save My Fabric Scraps over at Bee in my Bonnet, I have bins for 10" squares, 6 1/2" squares (I used this size so they would work with my Midi Twister template), 5" squares, 3 1/2" strips and squares, 2 1/2" strips and squares, and 1 1/2" strips and squares (though I'm not sure I really want to work with pieces this small). It felt so good to have a way to keep my leftover fabric in a usable, organized way. I look forward to some scrappy projects in the near future.

You can see more of my June progress in this post.

Linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts, My Quilt Infatuation and TGIFF.

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