HOW TO SEW - JAPANESE RICE BAGS - Full tutorial packed with tips and great ideas!

hello i'm crafty patty and thank you for tuning in if you were watching one of my past sewing videos we showed you how to make this japanese nut bag and i will leave a link to this video if you haven't seen it so you know where to find it and i'll leave that in the description box for you but i did promise in that video that i would show you how to make another bag so today we are going to be making the japanese rice bay reversible if wanted make them for kids christmas lunch storage baskets and i'm also going to show you at the end of the video how to make one that's narrow and tall for certain christmas items and i'm also going to show you how to use up an old pair of jeans so keep watching and let's get started on how to make the japanese rice bay [Music] and you might be wondering why do they call it a japanese rice bag well in the old days they used to actually put the rice in these bags and then they would carry it to the emperor for an offering now of course in the old days they didn't have fabric choices like this so they would use scraps of fabric they would do kind of crazy quilts kind of idea if you're quilting you know what i mean by that and indigo dies and that's what they used to use just whatever scraps of fabric they had around to carry the rice in so we've just modernized it about a little bit more to make them a little bit more fun if you're going to be doing a lot of quilting or even just projects like this it really is helpful if you've got a cutting board your omni grid ruler and your rotary cutter it makes things so much faster and so much easier and you get nice sharp clean cut lines of course you'll want to have your ironing board and iron a spray bottle is going to help with some interfacing that we're going to be using and i'll explain that in a bit and a really handy tool for turning your pieces of fabric to the right side is a little tool called turn it all and this is really handy and i'm going to show you how we use this further on in the video and this is optional this is my unique two-in-one marking pen and this will assist if you want to make little dots so you've got a point where you can see where you're starting your sewing and that will become more clear when we get to the swing part fabrics i generally always use 100 quilting cotton fabrics or just cotton fabric and a fun way to do this is as you've seen you've got a really nice complimentary fabric on the inside and a darling little fabric on the outside and the easiest way to get complimentary fabrics like that is go and buy fat quarters these particular ones have got the little orange fox and the fox here so they complement really well together i found these at walmart but you can find fat quarters anywhere in your fabric stores how big is the fat quarter you want to make sure that you pre-wash all your fabric and now this fat quarter here this will fit a little bag like these probably anywhere from a three inch to if you're lucky depending if they've been generous when they cut for the fat quarter you might get a five inch if you want to make a bigger bag than the five then i would suggest you buy a half a meter of fabric that is almost like two fat quarters and that will allow you to have enough fabric to make a larger bang if you want to be even larger then buy yourself a meter or a yard and uh that will allow you to make a bigger bag and maybe even a smaller one as well but remember when you're buying a fabric you need to buy two pieces you're buying fabric for your outer and you're buying a fabric for the lining so you need two pieces now let's talk about interfacing this bag that i've made more of like a lunch bag no interfacing and it's floppy now if you like the floppy look then you don't need to add the interfacing let's say you want one to use as a storage bin to put on some shelves like this one this one is nice and stiff and i added the interfacing on the outer fabric and on the inner fabric to make it really stiff you'll probably find your interfacing by the yardage or meter and it comes in all different weights there's some that is fusible and there's some that is just for sewing in you want to get the fusible the stiffer fusible interfacing that i'm using today is from pelon and this one here is 809 a decor bond and that is quite a heavy interfacing here's a heavy one and this is a lightweight i think you can see the difference there you want your sides to stay up and not be really rigid then what i did with this one i only applied the fusible interfacing to the outer fabric and i didn't apply any to the inside fabric that interfacing is again from pellon and this one is fusible featherweight and of course you'll need your sewing machine some sewing pins and some sewing scissors when working on projects where you've got an outer fabric and an inside fabric and you want those to be exactly the same size then a good trick is to lay both pieces of fabric together as close as you can to match up your sides and then you will have exactly the same amount for inside and outside and it'll be much easier for sewing believe me so the first thing i want to do is you might not see it from that far away but i've got some salvage here so i want to take those savage edges off so i'm just going to by using my omni grid ruler and my cutting board i can match up my lines here to down here and i'm just going to trim that off and the same on all other sides i'm just going to go around with my omni grid ruler and we're going to cut off nice clean lines to work with so i've worked it out by counting up and counting across this way but i will be able to get my rice bag at four and a half inches which would be 11.43 centimeters so the first thing it's easier to just cut off your strips first so what we need to do is cut our drawstring strips first and we don't have a long piece of fabric so we're going to have to join two of these together to make a nice long drawstring and we have to make two drawstrings so that means we have to cut this at one and a half we're going to make them one and a half inches wide which is 3.81 centimeters and we need to cut four of these okay if you're not sure how long to make your drawstrings then you can just do an estimate you can kind of just do a little loop around here and let's say that i've got about four squares by four squares here i'm making well say four inches by four inches which is about 10.16 centimeters and then you want some a little bit of tail so you can tie it so let's say that would be approximately say perfectly 30 inches or that would be about 76 centimeters so you can do that and then you know how long to cut your drawstrings now don't freak out the way i'm cutting this because i'm trying to be in camera for you don't worry i've never cut myself [Music] and i've and as you remember i've got my top and my bottom here so there's one each for each drawstring bear so this is where you can see the the ruler and the rotary cutter really works well there's two and the way i like to make my tabs is i cut my lining fabric larger than the outside fabric and then it gives a nice little border to each side so we're going to be cutting our lining at two inches and our outer fabric at one and a half inches now just to make that easier because i've got my lining underneath i'm just going to cut them both at two inches i'm going to waste half an inch i'm not too worried about that so here's our cut at two inches this is my outside fabric and this is my inner fabric my inner fabric is the one that's going to be wrapping around so i need to cut this one smaller so we're going to bring this back in here and i'm just going to take a half an inch off of that now i'm only going to be making four tabs so we'll have enough here to make four tabs so there's our fab four tabs this is for our drawstrings and now we've got this left over to cut out we need five squares so this is where i was counting up one two three four five one two three four see i don't have enough to make a five inch bag so i've got to make this four and a half so there's one two three four and a half and there's my one two three four so i've got just enough for four and a half so i'll line it up make sure i'm cutting it four and a half and we will have a few squares left over but that's okay here's my four and a half there's my half one two three four and i'm only taking just a smidge and off the top here and i will have some squares left over but this is just the easiest way to show you how to cut all your pieces okay so we've gone that way now let's come around this way and we're coming and making a square so now we have to go four and a half this way again i'm lining up my half mark from my omni good ruler half down here one two three four and one half and let's cut through those squares let's do that again here's those ones again here's our half we need four more that's four squares you still need fifth squares so we'll have some fabric left over and this is just what we've got left over a fabric so that's pretty good we haven't really wasted hardly anything at all we can always use this for another project because i always find something to do okay so we only need five squares so we can take those ones away and then we've got these to make our outer and our lining now i have all our pieces cut now it's time to decide whether you want a really heavy duty straight side or you want it just a soft edge like this one i'm choosing the featherweight fusible interfacing and again i'm going to just square up this bottom line here so it's nice and straight so because we've cut these at four and a half or 11.43 centimeters we want to cut your fusible interfacing just shy of that so what i'm doing with my background grid on my cutting mat in my omni grid ruler i'm lining it up to my four and a half but i'm just pushing it back so i can see my line is just past my four and a half mark so it's just slightly shy of my four and a half and we'll cut that so again coming same way this way here's my edge and i'm going to make it just slightly shy of four and a half so here's my four and a half here i'm going to bring it this way so i can see my blue line underneath and then it'll be slightly shy of four and a half and i'll do the same for the other ones so you'll see on your fusible interfacing that one side is sort of feels fluffy soft and on the other side you'll see there's little tiny dots and that's the fusible portion of the interfacing so you want to place this side to your wrong side of your fabric so here's one of my squares right side wrong side is facing up and you want fusible side of your fusible interfacing right side so it will attach to the fabric and then because we've cut the slightly um short then it's not going to stick to your ironing board it might be nice if you've got like a squirt bottle and if you have just a little tiny bit of water on here it just tends to help it along place a piece of scrap fabric over top take your iron give it some steam and then press down for about 15 seconds move it to the next spot and again press down for 15 seconds and move it again 15 seconds and there we have oh and you can see my just caught slightly on the back side i didn't cut that one quite short enough that's okay that's what we're trying to prevent so there you go and do that to the rest of them and you're probably wondering like everybody else what this is this is a teflon cover that i've had on my iron for oh my gosh probably 30 40 years it's been on there a long time i've been crafting for many many years since i was very young and uh this is just used mainly for really delicate fabrics so you don't burn your fabrics but i never take it off because it just glides so nice over the fabric so i just leave it on teflon cover so i mentioned the little accessories here the unique fabric marker which will wash out and the sewing and knitting gauge now i've measured this on my sewing machine my needle is right up on this edge here and this gauge here is marking the edge of my presser foot so i always use that when i'm sewing these kind of projects so my will be my seam allowance on all of my seams so when you're sewing sometimes it's difficult to see exactly that because you want this pretty accurate when you're sewing so you can take your gauge and butt it up against your fabric and then what you're looking for is this perfect little square here you can see the edge here and just basically you're coming in and marking it where your square is and if you can eyeball that then that's great if you can't then you can certainly move it both ways to get the perfect little marking if you're happy with like just bring it in you can estimate where that is great so you can go around and mark them all and that's just an option but you'll see what i mean when i get to the sewing machine when we start sewing these squares together so remember how we cut four strips of your lining and four strips of your outer fabric for your drawstring we did that because this one strip isn't long enough for a drawstring so all we're going to do now is just place right sides together and we're going to sew each one of these together and again i'm using the edge of my presser foot to the edge of my fabric and i just find that easier for me so i'll just do a little back stitch go to the end back stitch and then what i like to do is save a little bit of time grab your next two right sides together pop that into your sewing machine just sit right into the presser foot there let it go along until it grabs there it goes it's grabbing back stitch and through again and back stitch grab your next one and then all you have to do is just clip in between each one of those saves a bit of thread saves a bit of time now you can just open that up and just with your fingers you can finger press it open those up okay and then you're gonna use your outer fabric and your lining fabric placing the right sides together and we're going to sew all the way down and right sides together and down we go all the way along matching up our presser foot with my material and when you get to your seams let's make sure they're both sitting open nice and flat and when you get to the end you're going to stop and pivot and come around to the end here manually come to where it's at the end pivot sew across and that's your needle is always down lifting the presser foot pivot and down and let's sew across the other side and then just straight down because we've got to turn this and backstitch and on the end that you've sewed across the bottom just trim your corners and you can take a little excess off the end as well and this is where you get to have fun with your turning tools so find the end of your fabric here choose a tool and you'll see that there is this set there's three so you find the corresponding tool that will fit into the hole of the tool that's for this one this the bigger stick is for this one and we're going to use the blue one because that's what will fit into this hole if you're wondering why this looks like it went through the ringer i did the whole reverse and got it turned the other side and then i realized my camera wasn't on so second time lucky the camera's on take your one tool with the hole in it that will fit into your opening and bring that all the way to your other end and there we are to the end that we've closed off take your corresponding stick put it into the hole give it some ease here and then let that go inside of the hole you can just keep pushing it in and then once you've got a good amount in there just come back and then pull down on this end here pull down like so pull that pull down and there's our stick you can take our stick and our straw to be off and then just keep pulling down on this until you've got the whole thing reversed to the other side voila and then while you've got your stick in here just give it a poke and then take your stick out and then the last thing to do is you can just use your stick again and we're just going to poke this end of the fabric inside make it nice and tidy and then we're going to take it to the sewing machine and we'll just sew across to close that off and i'm going to take these to the ironing board and give them a nice pressing our next step is to sew the tabs for the bags that we loop our drawstring or ribbon through now i got you to cut one long length because when we sew this all together you only have to turn your fabric once and then you just go chop chop chop and you've got your four or your eight depending on how long you've made this you do have the option if you don't have enough material to do this one length is to just cut your strips individually like this and make them one at a time you don't have to do the borders like i've done and that's why i've gotten you to cut one and two inches one at one and a half inches you can cut them all just at one and a half if you want to depending on how wide you want your tabs on the little three four and five inch little bags i choose to just do four tabs and that cinches up quite cute and when i get into the larger bags i think this one warrants to have the eight tabs and of course larger definitely eight tabs for this one so let's make the taps and place the right sides together just line up one of your edges that will be my right side and we're going to sew all the way down this one edge and sew all the way to the end and back stitch so you've sewed down the left side now we're just going to move this fabric so we have our other side matching together it'll create a little bit of bump in the back don't worry about that and we're just going to sew down this whole edge here now to aid in the turning process we are going to close off this and we're just going to cut that off afterwards i have left a little bit of extra i know i've got lots of room to get my four tabs out of this length of fabric so we'll just go down and do a pivot and we're going to just sew it right across it will buckle on the other side doesn't matter we're just going to be cutting that off so i'm just going to push it this way and then i'm just going to sew right through we're not going to be keeping this silver there's no need to trim our corners let's just grab our turning tool and we'll turn this to the right side and again place your corresponding straw or tube whatever you want to call it and bring it up to the end row sewn across get your other stick and give yourself some ease here and poke your end into the hole and then when you get it started you can bring it the other way around and we don't care about that end because we're cutting it off so we don't need to poke out our corners let's go iron that and then cut them into tabs now when i'm ironing this i'm going to take my thumb and just work it back and forth making sure that i've got equal amount of border on each side and then i can press it in place just work your way along and that's what the border looks like i really love it how it just accents it just that much more and then the back side of course is the lining fabric and now that we've sewed it all in one piece we can just go ahead and cut at our four inch marks which would be 10.16 centimeters and even though it's a small width to cut i'm still going to use my rotary cutter because if you've got nice straight sides when you go to put that in to your middle of your fabrics to sew this will keep your tabs straight so accuracy up here is still important so cut up your four tabs if you're doing four keeping them straight and now our next step is we're going to be sewing our lining of the bag and the outer bag and then we'll be inserting our tabs and then we'll be almost done here's the placement of how you're going to lay out your five squares so we can form our box now if you've got a pattern in your fabric like i do you want to watch how you want to sew it together so if you were to place say this one with the butterflies facing this way that's how it's going to look on your bag but if you want the butterflies to be right side up well there's some upside and down but going this way that will be better so make sure that you place them all the right way so i'm going to change mine and make sure that they're all going in a good direction okay so the first two we're going to sew together are these two so we're going to bring right sides together and we're going to be matching up these edges and remember how we talked about those dots as an option well this is a reminder that when you're sewing on the machine you're going to start at your dot you're not going to go all the way to the edge you're going to only go up as far as the dot you're going to sew down and you're going to stop at your dot and you're going to do that on all four sides and when you're matching up your edge of fabric ignore your interfacing just make sure the fabric pieces are exactly together okay in it goes and now that i've got my dot there i can just look down and put my needle right into that dot and now we're going to just stitch about twice and you can do it by hand if you need to and then back stitch only two the reason we the reason we're doing that is because you don't want to sew past those dots if you sew into this area here it's going to create puckers on the edge in the corners of your basket you don't want that so let's sew down to the other dot when you get close you can just use your hand to make sure you get right into the dot again back stitch just two and forward just two and take that out and here's the two we just sewed and now let's take our top one and bring that right sides together and now we're going to sew along this edge same as before find your dot insert your needle forward twice and back we've now sewn all the middle ones together let's take a side bring that together right sides together and then when you're sewing this you just have to pull your seam open and then you know that you're matching up this edge to the full edge like so okay and the same on this side finger press it open and it comes up and make sure that your fabrics are matched up and again sew along dot to dot and now we've got our last side to do again bringing right sides together and again finger pressing the seam open matching up your edges finger pressing matching up your edges and sew dot to dark now we're going to be sewing the sides of our box so let's bring these two sides together like so and you're going to match up your ends here and then same on this end you're just going to pull and squish it all together like so and i want you to start sewing on the bottom of the bay this will prevent it from buckling your corner here and you can always straighten up your edges later on so always start at the bottom of your bag and work toward the top and i'm finding my little purple dot in goes the needle you can back stitch here and this time we're going to sew all the way to the end past the dot so sewing past the dot and back stitch there's the first corner of your bag let's pull up the next corner so now we're going to sew these two together so again let's match up our corner and then on this side just squish it all together [Music] matching up your edges and do the same again find your dot and again all the way to the top past the dot and for the next side again let's put these two together now folding together squishing that corner flushing up your sides and sew it again and our last side and you've now made your outer box and just leave it like that inside out and now you're going to take your lining fabric and do exactly the same thing all over again right sides together dot to dot and again as a reminder when you're sewing your sides you're gonna start at the bottom and you're going to come all the way to the bottom and the same for the other three sides and on your bottom of your bag here's your bottom i'm gonna clip all your corners so let's just take a corner and you can just squish it together like so and then just sorry the camera move trim up just to the sewn line and cut off your corners on the bottom just on the bottom and do the same for your outer fabric clipping your corners on the bottom and just fold them all together and take off those corners don't cut into your seam though your next step you've got the right side on the inside and on your lining we need to reverse this one so we're going to reverse and turn this one so the fabric the right side is to the outside and we'll just poke in these little corners with our finger and then we're going to pop the lining inside of our bag so now we're going to have right sides together right sides to right sides and now i want you to match up all your corners with your lining and outer fabric you can press one of your seams to the right press your lining to the left come in and watch where your seam lines are and make sure they are matched up perfectly once you've got that matched up let's just put a pin in place and go around and do the same thing for all your other corners now this is the beauty of accuracy when you want to have your lining match your outer fabric if you go in and give a little tug then both of those fabrics should be perfectly the same size with no puckering now we've just got four tabs so we're just going to fold a tab in half match up the top portions and we're going to slip it in between the outer fabric and the lining and we're going to place it the same distance across our two pieces of fabric and you can just eyeball to when you think you've got that in the middle of your pins or i should say in the middle of your sides okay so when that's perfectly placed pop in a pin and around you go and do your other tabs folding exactly in half popping in between make sure they all line up and the straight straighter this is that's why we cut these nice and straight then the straight of the tabs will sit on your bag okay our tabs are in place now you want to decide where you're going to turn your bag now the the widest portion will be on one of your corners because we've got the tab in the middle so i find it easier to allow this part to be my turning part so what i'm going to do is i'm going to place a red pin just on the edge of my tab here and then i'm going to place another red pin just to the edge of this tab here and those are my start and stopping points so let's take it to the machine we'll start here so all the way around and stop at the red pin and now if you've got just your storage unit here and you can take that off and just expose your free arm now is a good time to do that because then your little bag will fit right over your free arm and it'll be easier for sewing and so there's my red pin i'm going to start sewing right there [Music] and i'm coming up to my red pin i will be stopping there and backstitch of course [Music] and then we can take that off and there's our opening that we've allowed for turning so i'm gonna just use my little stick here again and i'm gonna come and just push into this and then bring it up through that hole and that will help me to get this turned to the other side and then once you've got it started you can take your stick out pop the rest in there and there we have our lining ready to pop into the middle of our bag like so and now what we're going to do is we're going to go and we're going to press this gorgeous little bag with the iron and then we're going to top stitch around and then we'll close up our opening that we use for turning while it's pressed and we'll top stitch all the way around and i like to top stitch seeing my outside fabric because that's going to show the most and so it just gives me a better guide to see what i'm doing and right now i'm following the inside of my presser foot along the outside of my fabric for my top stitch line and of course back stitch and around you go and for these bags what i like to do is i like to grab a corner and squish it together and press those sides down and that just boxes it up a little bit more and then you can come in with your iron and just get in there and iron the lining okay we finished up our drawstring so let's just thread them in here nice and easily i'm going to have it end up on one corner here so we'll just work this around and then just open it up make sure you've got the same length on both ends here and then you can take your ends and tie a knot up to the corner here just an easy knot there's our first one and they'll come around with the next chord and this time we'll start on the opposite corner and we'll start here and there we have our completed bag matching drawstring matching tabs inside and outside and if you want you can reverse it because it is reversible and now you've got a whole other bag on the other side and then what i would do is just flip your drawstrings to accent the other color for the top and of course draw it up and you've got your darling little bag i promised you some extras at the end of the video and this is what i've come up with generally speaking a true japanese rice bag is equal sides but what if we just take that and think outside the box a little bit i was looking through my christmas fabric scraps and i've got all these long pieces that i had left over so i thought well what if we made a bag that was taller and that is just what i'm going to do i've made the inside lining already and this is going to fit a bottle of wine and all you have to do is just work on the same concept of having your perfect square in the middle any size you want but as long as these strips are exactly the same width as your center square then you can make these sides as long as you want so basically i've shown you how to sew this process i'm going to go ahead and sew this together and i will show you the final results soon okay you ready for the final reveal here it is look at that all out of scraps of christmas fabric and i added some gold ribbon for the drawstrings so we didn't have to make those let's pop that bottle of wine in there let's pull out the strings and how about we just tie a bow there's the bow there you go what do you think i love it but feel free you don't have to make it out of christmas fabric make it out of everyday fabric and you've got a beautiful gift a beautiful bag from ball of wine and now we've even got more for you keep watching well here you go my husband gave me these jeans a while back i've had them in my back been there i'm going oh i might do something with them i don't know well yeah this is what i'm gonna do with them i'm gonna make another japanese rice bag so i mean if you hadn't given these to a 20 year old they all loved them they're already ripped so i'm going to try to get some more squares out of these pants the side seam is going to be my drawstring so i'm just about halfway there i got five out of this pant leg so i cut off the top and let's cut up the other pant leg so there you go i've managed to get five squares for my lining five squares for my outer fabric they're cut at seven inches or that would be 17.78 centimeters i've cut up my seams for my drawstrings and i've got enough left over to make some tabs i'll make a simplified tab this time by just folding a piece of fabric in half and sewing down and turning so i'm going to carry on and make this up you've seen the process exactly the same as the other bags and wait to see what it's going to look like this is what happens when you've got a creative mind it never shuts down went to see woke up and now i want to put a pocket inside my jeans japanese rice bag this back pocket would have been perfect but it's the same size as my square that i've cut if i was making a larger bag it would have been perfect but if i try to sew this in this seam here is going to be way too bulky even though i'm using a dinner needle so i did cut the pocket from the front and that will fit nicely on my little square and i'm going to just zigzag around well what do you think there's my finished jeans bag made from an old pair of jeans that we're going to get thrown out and we've recycled them and i've put the pocket on the outside just so you can see it but it's reversible so it can be on the inside or the outside so we've got our seams for our drawstring and there you have it and was this hard to sew well if you've ever hemmed a pair of jeans about the same you really have to force your way up over the heavy seams with all that bulk in there but it is doable but if you're going to start out i would start out with the cotton first get yourself familiar with how to make the bags and then advance to your harder materials to sew well i hope you're still with me i know it was a long video but i hope i gave you some inspiration and all the ideas to just fill your boots and make them for children or make a jeans one or make one more manly or make some christmas ones or make them to be on your shelf for storage bins or miss floppy it just goes on forever i could be honest telling you all these wonderful things you can do and how to be more creative with this but i would love to hear your ideas on what you're going to make and tell me what you think this one here by the way is made from a rawhide vinyl i just wanted to make one to look a little bit more manly this one is the same amount of difficulty for sewing as probably the jeans one so just caution there but it is possible and i might fill this up with some leather tools for a gift maybe i'll throw some sewing supplies or some makeup or anything on this one you can give that as a gift these make wonderful gifts and they can make also as a gift bag to put another gift inside so i love these bags i think these are a great idea and i hope you do too thank you so much for watching thank you so much for all your wonderful comments that's what keeps me inspired to keep making more videos like this bye bye for now you

Channel: Crafty Patti

Views: 17,886

Rating: 4.9398499 out of 5

Keywords: how to sew Japanese rice bags, sewing tutorial, how to sew a bag, easy sewing projects, handmade gifts to make, sewing gifts to make, fabric gift bags, diy, best Christmas gifts, best hostess gift, gifts to sew

Id: J8zCsaUyCew

Length: 57min 30sec (3450 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020