Wetbags: Always fun to sew out of stash!

My friend T, who I made the wet/dry bags for a few months ago, contacted me last week to see if I could make some wetbags for a family member who is expecting soon and planning to cloth diaper. There was one small catch: The baby shower was coming up soon and so she needed me to ship the finished bags by Saturday. I agreed, with one small caveat: I had to be able to make the bags with what I had at home already in my stash. Hubby was traveling on business last week and I knew I wouldn't have time to hit up a fabric store to buy any additional supplies.

Luckily, I just got some cute printed PUL, including that Later Gator print that I used on those pocket diapers I showed in my last post. T really liked a print called "Winter Giraffes." I went through my massive eBay zipper stash and found some dark brown zippers that were the appropriate length and matched the print well.

The result... two large wetbags and a smaller bag for wipes:

I sewed these in a similar way to the "quick and dirty" wetbags that I did previously, but with a few small tweaks.

For starters, I added handles. For the two larger bags, I did a layer of PUL and a layer of white suedecloth for the handles. I don't love how they turned out, because the suedecloth does peek through a bit at the edges of the handle. For future reference, handles should always be entirely the same material.

Anyway, here is a shot of the handle when I was sewing. This was when I made the first seam, with wrong sides together. I made sure that the handle was pointing to the outside (i.e. in the same position it would be on the finished bag). I then sewed the seam and sewed back and forth a few times across the handle to reinforce it. Hard to see in the thumbnail, but you should be able to see it if you click to enlarge:

Then I turned the bag inside out (right sides together) and sewed the second seam. The end of the handle ended up peeking through into the inside of the bag. I trimmed it down so that it was fairly flush with that second seam. Since the end of the handle is visible, it's important to either finish that end or use fabric that doesn't fray. Also, I think it's good to use 100% polyester fabric; cotton fabric might wick moisture from inside the bag to the outside of the handle.

I also sewed the zippers a bit differently. On the PUL-only wetbag I did previously, the raw ends of the zippers were still visible. This time, rather than trimming down the zipper to be the same width as the wetbag, I left a little bit of a tail on the zipper. When sewing the second set of side seams, I made them wide enough at the top (about 5/8") to encase those zipper tails -- so the tails ended up in between the first and second side seams, just like the raw edges of the sides of the PUL. Then, once I was past the zipper tail, I slowly decreased the seam allowance until it was about 1/4". The result isn't super noticeable from the outside of the bag, and I think it makes the zipper ends look much more finished and professional:

Finally, I figured out a little sewing technique that made sewing these easier. I've always had trouble when sewing wetbags because the PUL tends to stretch/slide as I sew down the zipper. In the past, I've been able to compensate enough to make that seam work in spite of the stretching/sliding, but when I sewed the first of these bags, I was having an awful time with that darn zipper. Teflon foot, zipper foot, didn't matter. Finally, I flipped the fabric over, so that the zipper was on top and the PUL was on the bottom, shiny side down, and I sewed with a regular ol' zig zag foot (straight stitch, though). This worked really well! Hardly any stretching/sliding! I'm not sure why I've always sewn with the PUL on top, but I'm definitely going to try PUL on bottom again if I do another wetbag!

Hopefully all that makes sense. These did take a little longer than I expected because of figuring out some of these tweaks, but they were still reasonably quick to sew up. I did get them done and off to T on Saturday!

And I still have a diaper cut left of that Winter Giraffes fabric to make a diaper for Noob :)