How to Make an Insulated Lunchbox | a Shabby Fabrics Tutorial

[Music] hi it's jen from shabby fabrics with a really fun and practical project for you today this is the insulated lunchbox this is a brand new product from june taylor and if you've seen our videos before you've seen the quilt as you go projects a lot of fun well they continue to create new things in this time i love that there's this adorable lunch tote i've done this in a fun one for the kids unicorn kingdom by riley blake i've also have this in sweet beginnings a new collection coming in from one of the newest designers at maywood studio and then secret stash and the warm tones by laundry basket quilt so you can see that there's a lot of options and how practical i bring my lunch to work every single day no more brown bags no more plastic bags i'm now going to be putting my lunch in here and it's going to be keeping it nice and cold i love that it's insulated i'm going to give you some options of things that we discovered through the process of making these three things you can see i adjusted where my straps were here i'll talk to you about that as we dive deep into the tutorial and why i chose that option we also will get going over the option of the zipper here it has nothing covering it it's just what's called the zippy doodan zipper but i'm going to show you how to cover that with fabric and do a fun little accent here i did that in the gingham which i thought was a lot of fun so i'll be going over that this is a longer tutorial so we'll try to break that up into chronological steps from beginning to end if you have to stop and come back and finish at another time that's great just know though it's worth watching it through and that way you can just make yours and you already know your options and you can decide on what you want to make your lunch tote and of course we're going to want to know what that is we're going to want to see that now june taylor what they're doing in their kit let's go over what the kit is going to look like you'll of course get this insulated lining you can kind of hear this that's the insulating portion and that'll be for one bag what will also be coming inside your kit of course are instructions strapping for the handles and then depending on which kit you grab one of six color zippers they have white black a red navy blue kind of a taupey color um and i think they're calling that camel and a gray so you would be able to pick out whichever one of those kits is going to work best for your fabric collection so once the once you decide that the process of course is going to be the same no matter what color you choose now let me show you one of the cool things about the zippity doodon zippers first off zipper zippers intimidate me i'm just going to make a true confession about that but that's june taylor did something really cool and they made this flange here so that once we prepare our fabric um and we'll i'm jumping ahead all we have to do is sandwich that in between there and stitch it down this makes putting a zipper in an absolute no-brainer so that even if you've never put one in before this can be your first one you'll absolutely have a complete success and i'll be going over that so that's why they did that and i thought that was a pretty clever idea on their part okay we're going to dive right in i'll just keep the one that i'm going to be remaking with us today is going to be this one and what i'll do this straps go all the way down and around just like this one does and you know what let me show you something else inside i'm going to show you why a little bit later on i'm going to give you the option of if you don't want that strap going all the way down and around because it makes it it comes up all the way in the middle here and it can be quite a bulky seam in the middle for that reason by the way i'm going to be using the schmetz 100 over 16 denim needle this is meant to be going through a lot of density so i've already put that inside my machine if you don't already have a jeans or denim needle a size 100 16 just grab a pack of those you don't want to break a needle in the middle of this project of course so by putting our straps up a little bit higher here on this bag like i did it avoided the strapping coming into that seam in the bottom so that's the only reason i wanted to show you that option today but let me take the other two off the table and we'll just be focusing on this one here because we'll be recreating that so our step one included in the instructions unless we can look at our batting it's quite long no need to iron that you know as you're working with it it'll naturally smooth out for you so the very first step they'd like us to do and they even say do not iron directly on the insulated batting sat iron at medium wool setting for ironing on the fabric when layered with the insulated batting so we already know that when we do get ready to iron we'll go ahead and put that on a probably a medium setting on this one medium to a warm setting cut around the pattern printed on the insulated batting leaving an inch all the way around so you could just grab any size ruler and put that on here and just leave a one inch buffer all the way around you've got the front of the bag and you've got the back of the bags you're going to repeat that step you'll have two fabrics in fact i'm just going to cut those apart real quick just so that i'm only working with one just for space space reasons that will be helpful for for me and less clutter for you to be seeing on the table so first thing we would do is you have two pieces of fabric this is a great project for half yard cuts you'll need a half a yard you could do that with fat quarters if you if you didn't mind that these two halves had different you could even do this with a fat quarter project basically you will take your half yard and simply cut it at the fold this is a fat quarter right now you can cut that down to the 16 by 20 as they recommend but there's really no reason to because once i'm just going to quickly i'm just going to quickly eye that one inch by the way that one inch around is not critical by any means they just want you to leave a bit of a buffer around there but let me just cut that quickly so that i can show you our next step you'll layer those fabrics and by the way if you have a directional fabric as we do here be mindful of that so looking here on this side see our bird is right side up so in this instance let me go ahead and let's just address that fabric first so our bird let's turn that around so of course we want the top of the bag to be here so let's look at our batting real quick before we start layering so this is the top edge so make sure if you do have a directional fabric that this is right side up go ahead and bring these now right side together and make sure that when you layer this that that's at the top zipper edge so that your motif is right side up that makes sense go ahead and pin in position and per our instructions we will sew on the dashed line leaving the top edge completely open so once this has pinned we'll sew here stop in those corners come all the way around all the way around and you'll go ahead and stop there now the solid lines are what you'll be cutting on they do mention to backstitch at the beginning and end to secure as you would expect one thing that we know when we cut this out is we had to especially in these little corners here we had to cut in just a little bit when we went ahead and turned it through otherwise it kind of puckered in those corners so you are stitching all the way around and cutting on those lines but before you turn that through go ahead and cut just a little bit almost almost all the way to the corner but not quite here and here and again here and here and then you will turn that all the way through obviously all this bulk would have been cut away we completely had to use our point turner to get these out as you can imagine i've already done that step ahead of time so let me just show you what where we are now in our project i we even jumped ahead and just put some quilting and this is already a very long video but let's pretend that the quilting wasn't here and we've just turned that through this is those areas where we really really got in there with our point turner at the top and had to push those out even in these really all of these corners once that's done we're over here now you're going to want to add some quilting we just found our center and with a light colored fabric you can use a friction pen and a straight edge to go ahead and draw your line or on a dark pen you might want to use a chalk pen then again we used moving to the right just an interval that we liked it was one and a half inches and we just kept drawing lines and drawing lines and again to the left and we just sewed on a coordinating thread of course you're going to be seeing that you repeat that for the other piece of our batting because we notice that there's two pieces so that's our inside and that's our outside and of course that's our top notice our bird motif is right side up because we were careful about that we already covered that go ahead and put that aside for now and let's talk about the straps so the straps are each cut to four inches i've got one of them done but let me go ahead and bring out one that isn't um completed so they have us cut those straps to four inches by 36 now that's assuming that you're going to go ahead and have that strapping go all the way down around the bag and even up inside in that center seam that i showed you if you don't want to do that and you want your straps to begin a little bit higher i shortened that length by nine inches and i cut them to 27. so that's up to you to decide or maybe you have a different length you want so you can decide on that maybe you want maybe you want this handle to be longer and you still want that to start here then maybe you're not going to trim any of this away and maybe your handles are up here so you can decide on how you want that where the straps to begin and the length of that strap whatever you decide that length is the process will be the same and we'll start with our hot ruler where we measure in a full inch and let me just demonstrate a hot ruler that may be a new concept to you you know us trying to fold in an inch i'm kind of eyeballing i'd have to guess well then beautiful part about a hot ruler is i don't have to guess at all because it's indicated there's a quarter there's a half three quarters one all the way up to two and a half so let's just pretend that's a raw piece of fabric we haven't done any anything with it i just scoot i put that on my fabric and then i roll the edge over and i'm like oh nope i'm not quite to my one which is right here i just scoot it back and then you just keep and you're like yep that's my spot what i love about hot rulers is i can iron right on them with the hottest of irons and it's not going to damage anything because we can't do that with an acrylic ruler or it would melt so that's the beautiful part about hot rulers both ends you'll have that same one inch then you would simply fold to the middle and press to establish where's my center open that back up fold the edges inward just like that and press again that's how we prepared the strap and that's before we put the strapping inside whatever length that you cut this to the strapping is going to be cut just a little bit shorter and it's easy to determine what that length is because we want our strapping to come just up to this but not over top otherwise when we secure that it's too much bulk you can imagine if the strapping was going up inside that center seam as well it's way too much bulk and that's why the strapping is only from this edge of where that fold is to that other edge so let me go ahead and do that you know what i mentioned that i'm going to make mine um i'm going to actually make mine full because it's harder i will make my strap go all the way into the center seam so you're seeing that that's the hardest way to do it it's the most amount of bulk so i'll go ahead and do that and then just know if you want to have your strapping shorter it's easier and you'll just decide on where you want that to be and make sure it's at the same spot on both sides so let's adjust our strapping i like that they give me plenty of that so that i can decide where i want that to be and based on what i'm seeing i'm going to cut that right here pull that back so you can see that i'm just going to cut that right to that edge right there just put that in place under there fold that in half and it you can kind of adjust it so that it's kind of it doesn't go all the way to the edge completely so it's you can kind of sandwich it so it's more in the middle so that when we sew this closed that strapping is kind of right in the middle let me show you the one that i've completed and that's what we did here we just went ahead and sewed on this edge we didn't need to close this because this is caught inside the seam in the middle if you are going to go ahead as i showed you on the other bag and have that start here go ahead and close the just stitch across that end as well all right so let me go ahead load in my gold thread i will stitch that down we're going to need this for our next step so i would because you're going to see that i had this loaded in ready to go but let's go ahead and sew those down just as just a little bit on either side and when i get back we'll move on to the next step so i have one of the straps and we're now going to be moving into our second page we're up in this part here i want to make sure that you're seeing that so on the front main make sure your your outside is on top and right side up and that because this is the opening they they have a similar footprint if you had a print that did not have a directional nature to it it'd be very easy to get this flip flop but it's those raw edges that we want up they have us measuring in by six inches and go ahead and mark that so if you have a dark fabric and you think that a friction pen you would not see it now i'd probably be able to see that here because i have a kind of a pink flower here but maybe over on this side the six inches it's dark there that's where using a chalk marker is fantastic for that i'll just go ahead and mark that we will put our strap that's where our strap will be nestled inside and that's what they're showing you right here let me just we'll zoom in on that that's the edge of the strap and inside so let me demonstrate that show you that to you that's our line right here move my head out of the way and our strap would be right here now look at this channel right keep the six inches as a general guide we just want to have some level of symmetry so while that's where my line is that would bias my strap kind of not really in the middle of that lane i'm going to go ahead and just shoot for the middle of that lane right there i think i like that a little bit better so that's kind of your judgment you know if you're in the ballpark of six five and three quarters that's fine just make it the same on both sides that's all you want to make sure you're doing we'll come around let's make sure we don't get any twists in the strap that's our next line same thing you know i'm not going to go on the inside i'm just going to kind of straddle that lane this will depend on the quilting you do the spacing you want but i'm just going to go ahead and put that right like that and i'm using my flower head pens on this those patchwork pins that i love so much for piecing are just not strong enough we use them because they have a nice light gauge to them remove that over a touch but they would bend in this with this much strapping and the fabric and of course this this batting that's inside batting like material whatever that's called now from the top because of course we need to anchor this at the top this is where they say to measure down three and a half inches and i'd recommend you just get a ruler kind of flatten this out at the top get your straps all lined up and put that right here's my my um so that's my half one and a half three and a half i'm going to lay that down across the top of both of them at the same time and mark them that way we have symmetry versus trying to just mark one at a time here and here now inside our pattern they talk about so an x at the top of the straps to reinforce if you want to go ahead and draw that x you can just come down a touch draw and you could be very specific if you wanted i think that's about an inch right there and draw that again and draw that exit because that may be something you've never done before or you're uncomfortable kind of just eyeballing it if you're if you're comfortable just eyeballing it great we're just going to be reinforcing those straps at the top with that x we don't need to do this at the bottom because that's going to be caught up in our seam allowance if you are going to be doing the shortened version of that and that's up on the back in fact let me grab that bag i want to show that to you real quick on here i did do the x on both of those spaces so if you are doing the shorter version like i did on the this one the sweet beginnings bag you'll be doing the x um four times on this side two at the top two at the bottom and this of course the same on the opposite so i'll keep that handy for us to reference and i'm just going to draw that line now we will start sewing i have a 1d in there i have my gold thread and i'm going to try to just stitch right over top of where i had already stitched my strapping closed when i come up here i'm going to come across trying to come across here here here one more time and then back down that lane that's all we're trying to get accomplished and we'll repeat that with the other side of the strap and of course on the other half of the bag same exact steps [Music] now that i've sewn the straps on i would of course do that a second time and it's exactly of course the same and we're at this stage now this is when the zipper comes into play and i definitely found the strap was in my way i kept wanting to flop back so you might want to just use a flower head pin pinning that out of place for the next step this is where you can decide um if you want to have a covered zipper as is shown here or the other one that where it's just the plain zipper so i will show you as i said these zippers come that it's quite it's quite a lot of zipper and let me grab that other bag back i want you to see that it's a lot of the zipper flange you would just be seeing this is a finished edge so you don't need to worry about that but you'd just be seeing a lot of the zipper so if that's your plan no matter whether you're going to do the covered zipper which is what i'll be showing you today or you decide to do that we want to make sure that we do what's kind of kind of called a bar tack over here so that that zipper pull doesn't go sliding off our zipper and now we're in a real conundrum so what i'd recommend you do i'm sewing today on the bernina 770 i have a 1d foot and i've set my stitch with the 7.7 and my length to one and i'm just going to be showing you we're right here in this pattern i'm kind of jumping ahead i i really want you to do that step now where i'm just going to hop across here with a nice big wide zigzag so now i'm just going to hop to the left and to the right of the zipper my presser foot is kind of straddling the zipper and you can back stitch a couple times and that's all you're trying to do you're just trying to keep that slider that zipper pull from coming off now you repeat that on the other end so let's go ahead as i mentioned i'm not working with that color zipper today i have the gray one to try to pull out some of my grays in here so let's put this aside for just a minute and i want to show you that if you do decide to cover that zipper and add that kind of extra detail you'll cut this is not your instructions this is just from shabby fabrics we know the length of our zipper here is oh it looks like about 20 inches so go ahead and cut a one and a half inch wide by width of fabric strip and a coordinating fabric and you can go ahead and cut that right at the fold and you'll have two strips your hot ruler will come into play once again and we will turn that edge under by a quarter of an inch just on one side and you'll be doing that for both of your strips that you've you cut one that one one and a half inch wide strip in half so go ahead put your hot ruler down and now we're just looking for that quarter inch and pressing that all the way down just keep going now i've done one ahead of time just to save us time but that's again where that hot ruler comes into play and it helps us get that nice accurate quarter inch versus us guessing where that quarter inch is so that's this one that's just um done now i've done half of my zipper already so you can see what we're doing this is what we're going to be doing what we found when we we've already got a little bar tax on the ends what we found when we laid this down is we didn't want this to move when we first were making the bag and we had that we found it was kind of moving around this it just does it just even when we pinned it so we went ahead and grabbed out the bone double face this is basically a double-sided tape this worked wonders for us so we go ahead and lay that down where we want this to be all the way down the other way here well this is sticky this is very sticky i like that gonna help stuff not move and go ahead and trim that and just give it a good press now you'll just take off the very top do that with my nail right there and you'll peel that back and then you see that shiny part that's the sticky stuff now this will stay in our project forever and that's no problem doing that i'm going to put this do you see the stitch line there that when they sewed that flange on i'm just trying to be consistently the same distance away from my zipper you can choose what distance that is whatever you like this is by far the stickiest double-sided tape i've ever used and i've used a couple different brands this is fantastic um some are stickier than others this is exceptionally sticky so just like that and go ahead and give that a good press now this is where we'll change our stitch out i'm just going to go back to my normal stitch i'm going to reset my machine to what where it should be change out my zipper foot and we'll adjust our zipper foot accordingly and i'll in fact i'll do that uh with you so you can kind of see where i am and i'm stitching just right along there but here's the most important thing you see how this has a this is where you put your bag in you must roll this back you must roll that back because if you sew this right now with that closed you're going to sew it closed and won't be able to insert the bag so you can either roll that back and just remember it's back there or if you feel inclined to pin that away but i'm going to roll mine back and i know that's out of my way so i'm at my machine now i have my zipper foot and of course my needle is coming right down the center i know that i want to be sewing on that side so i'll go ahead and i'm going to adjust my needle to the left looks like i'm minus 4 on that i could probably do a minus 3. i'm going to go ahead and do a minus 4 on that and i'm just going with a 4d foot and we're just going to try to keep that the same exact distance away now for how do we do what do we do with this raw edge well i'm glad you asked me that we are just going to fold that under and give a nice press all the way down and i can see on this this zipper i think this one's just a little bit wider than the one i've used uh the other one if you even wanted to cut your strap your with a fabric strip i should say to one and three quarter you you have you'd have even more to turn under back here so that's an option for you as well it's nice to have just a little bit of something extra to turn under i think i did do that other one to one in and three quarter now that i think about it sometimes in when we're developing a project when we're doing these extra things that are not inside the pattern you try one with and then you like oh that's a little bit too snug so i think that we did end up cutting this one to a little bit kind of a chunkier one and a quarter almost one and three quarter but this will work again we don't want to miss that when we get ready to put our bag inside here there's a lot going on if you again want to kind of stabilize that um edge we can put the tape down once again now this time we can even put that move that out of the way for just a moment this time it's very very close to the edge [Music] you know the double-sided tape any time i've done a project and sometimes i just feel like i need an extra pair of hands and um that's the great part about double sided tape you can think of probably many times where it's like i just need something to hold that down temporarily that may be a good choice for you to use this double-sided tape for other projects okay fantastic i'm going to cut off this little bit of extra down here now that that's here our next step will be to insert our bag let's grab that and we're just trying to get this all the way up into that that wedge there and i'm going to make that a little more balanced so i have about the same amount overhanging there now again if we felt like i there's a lot going on i'm worried about this backing out i'm worried about that moving i i am gonna go ahead on the bottom side because i don't want that to back away when i'm stitching this down and i miss the bottom so i will again put on some more of this tape so that i know that bottom area is secure for those of you that make a lot of bags and totes this is probably not needed for you you're comfortable using these tools putting in zippers and whatnot but for those of us where this is quite new we don't do this very often these are these are things that help us be a little more confident with projects like this and now i know that is not going to scoot away from me when this comes down you could certainly put tape again i feel good about this because i can see this i just can't see that back side now i'm going to use some flower head pins pinning that all together i want to encourage you to get a healthy seam because it looks like this zipper is stacked right on top of the other but if that rolled back ever so slightly and you only have an eighth of an inch seam you could miss that back there so i'm going to go ahead and have a little bit of a chunkier maybe not a full quarter but something where um it's not an eighth because i've got to catch that back part to secure this whole thing so i'm going to change out my presser foot one more time and when we come back we'll go ahead and sew this side on together i'll do the opposite side and we'll keep assembling our lunchbox [Music] so now of course for the opposite side of our bag you naturally want to make sure you've got some good alignment so i'm going to repeat that process where i am laying down my double-sided tape setting my other half of my tote lunch lunch box i should call it in there where i'm making sure i'm straight across from here pin and i will again sew and when i come back we'll go ahead on to the next steps of boxing our corners and finishing up our lunchbox so we have our our bag looks like this so far on our next step we're up in the top right of our instructions unzip the zipper one to two inches i have plenty of that and uh we're going to turn our lunchbox so that the right sides are together and so this is representing our zipper up here our sides and of course there's our bottom it's nice that we've um we kind of have these quilting lines that help us line everything up i might even just come in with some wonder clips right now because we're going to now switch to half inch seam allowances from now till for this project until the very end and just go ahead and clip and we're going to sew that bottom a half an inch now this is where the bulk comes in the straps are in here that webbing ends here there's a lot going on this is again where that chrome needle the denim needle you want that and you want a presser foot that can plow through all of that quite quite nicely so check your needle make sure you've got a nice strong needle i'll sew that to a half inch [Music] and they've asked us to press the seam open if you just kind of push the bag on top of itself as best you can can definitely be a little awkward just try to get in there that's that bulk again and if as i mentioned if you want that option of uh this handle here with up above then you'll avoid those straps being caught in that seam there all together you won't even be dealing with that okay just press that open as good as you can refold the lunchbox so the bottom seam and the zipper are lined up so we see our zipper here here's here's this and we're just going to squish this kind of on top of itself just like that so our corners meet again we can do our wonder clips both on this end we don't want to trim the zipper off i know you're wanting to do that i wanted to do that but the risk of trimming the zipper now it before we sew this half inch is that if we lose track of our zipper it could again slide all the way off and now everything you've done is really lost i don't i don't know i've ever been able to get a zipper back onto the teeth ever successfully when one has come off inadvertently so that's why just wait go ahead and sew that half inch seam here and then you can go ahead and trim that off same on this end line them up wonder clip that nice press that open half inch seam trim that off i'll go ahead and do that and then when we come back we will go on to our next step i wanted to point out something here on on this end no problem my zipper teeth it's closed but we know our zipper is is in the middle here that means this is open i it's very important that you try to get them the zipper track where it's right there side by side it's not overlapping it doesn't have a gap it's as if the zipper was closed of course it can't be right now so that's just something you want to finesse and make sure that when you approach this that that track is just side by side like i said as if the zipper were closed we'll go ahead and do that together all right both ends have been sewn a half inch i trimmed so yep you have looks like that on one end that on the other and press the seam open that can be a little bit awkward even if you want to just roll that one back that's a lot of bulk i'm on full hot for sure even some steam trying to roll that back on both ends and now we'll move on to boxing our corners so you can see if we just pull that like that and press that open that's why they wanted that open we can put a wonder clip there we'll do this on all four corners and sew a half an inch let me do this over here same thing don't be afraid to push the bag around a little bit to where you need it to be and let's clip those things i love my wonder clips you know i found that crafting creating things it's either patchwork pens for quilting piecing flower head pins and then of course the clover i use that on every project because everything that i like a quilt needs binding and i always use my wonder clips for that but on really bulky projects like this where i don't want to risk bending my pins because this is a lot even for a flower head pin that's where these come into play so grab yourself some of those they're just you're going to find more uses for them than you probably realize and then over here same again let's get that nice and balanced keep that open let's sew half inch seam allowances i'll do one with you we're not going to be trimming anything away after that we'll be literally ready to turn our lunchbox out and then i can talk to you about the liner that's inside there what they've included inside their kit is a plastic liner that you can just put in the bottom of that but if you wanted to cover that with fabric i'll show you some options for that as well so we have our four corners boxed and now the part we've been waiting for to get to turn this through remember you've got those pins in there so she might want to grab those out i definitely when i was making one of the other bags reached inside there and that that hurt that was our sharp so let's turn our bag through so much fun you could use your point turner if you want to get those points out but you can get your hand in there so that's really not a problem nice how fun is that lunch in style just like that and remember they have the base so we can just you can just insert that in there and you're done right but if you want to go ahead how cute this is i love that it's so much fun but if you want to go ahead and have that be covered again these are not instructions they're just some measurements that we came up with i cut it um one strip seven and seven inches wide by width of fabric and then i just cut that to about 19 and a half inches long because basically my idea was i just want to sandwich that thing inside so i used my hat ruler just turn that edge under a quarter and a quarter and stitch that on both ends and then brought that right side together and sewed about you know 3 8 on the side so that look would look like this right here went ahead and did that and we can just clip those corners right there this is where you will want to use your point turner i guess i can clip that one right there too you can use your point turner to turn that through and then get those corners out and then we'll slip our base in and you have a lunch tote so how fun is that i know it's been a longer video but you can see this isn't difficult if they even say they june taylor rates this as an easy project there's just many steps along the way but of course if you're making them again and again it'll get faster every single time so we'll just insert our base in there just like that it's nice and cute slip it inside add our lunch and we're on our way and again this is insulated so you know it should be keeping things that are cold cold and warm warm so there we have our adorable lunch box so thank you so much hey if you know somebody else maybe a co-worker a family member that takes their lunch to work every day just like i do and maybe wants to be able to do that in style or maybe that's a great gift for them um they're one of those types of people that's hard to buy for this could be it so thanks again for joining me today and i'll see you soon on another shabby video [Music]

Channel: Shabby Fabrics

Views: 23,778

Rating: 4.9372692 out of 5

Keywords: quilting tutorial, sewing tutorial, shabby fabrics, sew, quilt, diy, lunch box, lunch tote, diy lunch box, diy lunch tote, tote, diy tote, clover, notions, insulated, insulated lunch box, insulated lunch tote

Id: abnHZpVwd-4

Length: 47min 46sec (2866 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021