Sew to sell Batch sewing 33 bags with minimal wastage boxed bags & pouches to sell using free fabric

hi welcome back to Christine's home Affairs I've set myself a big task I'm trying to use up all of this uh upolstery fabric that I've got in abundance let me tell you what I've done so far some of you might remember my soft boxy bags that I've done recently and they were a really big hit I found some other fabric that was nice and soft as well not quite as soft but really nice nonetheless and I've decided that I want to use it all up and I've got narrow pieces like this but they're quite long as well they're about that length and the widths vary the other thing I've got in the same fabric are big offcuts about this size now of the narrow ones and the wider ones there are I think about 16 pieces of each and what I've done so far is fused some fusible fleece to the back of every single piece just to give it a little bit of stability I want whatever bags I make to be able to sit up but not be too rigid this fleece will give me a really nice balance for whatever I might be working on I don't know yet so I've spent the past hour and a half using my heat press to fuse the fusible fleece to the back of all of these pieces of fabric so so far I've used 6 and 1/2 M of Paran uh that's the product that I'm using and and I spent 1 and 1/2 hours doing that thankfully I've got a heat press and it saved a heap of time I'd probably still be doing this 3 hours later if I didn't have that so what I've done fused all my fabric it's all ready now for me to cut up and sew up I just have to decide what projects I'm going to do my plan is to make lots and lots of different bags and pouches using up every single scar of this Fabric and only using the patterns that I've already uploaded to YouTube so rather than showing you any new products I'm going to make up a whole bunch of these bags over the next few weeks and at the end of it I'll be able to show you what bags I've been able to come up with I'm not going to make this a batch sewing video I will go through a few of my processes and let you know what I have been doing and what my thought processes are uh when I'm working on all of this fabric there is so much cutting to do that I've gone and put a brand new blade in my rotary cutter up it'll be much easier to glide through the fabric that way now I'm going to start off with the biggest project first I want to cut out the same fabric pieces that I did for my soft boxy bags I'll set these ones aside we'll work out a project for those later and then I have all of these bigger pieces here I'm going to see how many pieces I can cut into the soft boxy bag sizes and then as the pieces get smaller the projects will get smaller and there's just enough width in this piece of fabric to get one boxy bag that's 21 in wide by 16 Ines when I do this kind of work it's much easier for me to work in inches because the numbers are bigger and I and I can see better that's one down and lots more to go when I have a piece that's around about this size it's the same 21 in but it's a little bit narrower I think this is still a good size to make a boxy bag it's only 3 in shorter so I'll actually leave that one exactly as it is and turn that into a boxy bag as well it'll be a medium sized one and I'll now go on with the rest all right here's what I've done so far with the larger pieces of fabric I've cut them all into the soft boxed bag size and I've managed to get two of each color which is great because last time I could only get one so there's going to be 16 of these bags and one of them will be a smaller one the other thing I've done is cut up the lining for every one of these pieces so I've kept the lining hole and the outer fabric hole and with a smaller pieces I've also cut those up and I've managed to get two of each of those so so far I think I'm going to have about 32 bags and then I've got a couple of smaller pieces which will give me another two bags so that should be 34 bags possibly uh and the lining has been cut for all of those as well the stabilizer and the Linings have all been prepared the bigger ones have been cut to their final size so far I've spent 3 hours and 20 minutes and I've used 7.8 M of fabric for the lining so much fabric I'm going to Now set aside these smaller pieces because I'm not quite sure what I want to do with those these ones I know I want them to be the same size as my soft boxed bags so what I'm going to do now is fold all the pieces in half and cut out the box Corners each fabric piece will have the lining remain with it I want to keep all the pieces together at this stage just in case there's any discrepancy in the sizing and my lining is about half an inch bigger than the outer fabric because I'm going to put a false seam in the bottom and you've seen me do that with projects before I have a couple of uh offcuts that I keep for box corners and this one here has my seam allowance included and I'm going to have 1 and 1/2 in or 4 cm box Corners so I'll just place that on the edge of my fabric my seam allowance is there and then I'll trace this out and there's my box corner and I'm going to keep these fabric pieces lined up the fold on the lining will overhang slightly as long as everything's lined up at the top and the smaller piece that I have is taking into account the zip that I have on the side here so that will be a slightly smaller box Corner because I've still got a zip to add at the top so what I'll do now for all of my bigger bag pieces I'll mark out all the Box corners and then I'll cut them all out okay so last night in this morning I've really knuckled down and what I've done is placed labels on the inside of some of the lining pieces and also on the outside of some of my outer fabric pieces now when I say some what I'm doing is these labels here are my very first label that I've ever used and they've been the most popular so I've been putting those on most of my products but I've decided that because I now have some newer labels I'm going to use my Christine made it label on the outside of some of these bags it's a little bit of a test which if I remember I'll talk about later I've got my faux leather labels on the outside on the inside of those bags I'll have my regular label and then I've also got my regular labels on other bags so I've spent all of last night doing that and this morning as well I've also my son's here with a broken leg on the couch so I've put him to work and he's putting Zips in for me so the next thing I've done after all the labels is put my continuous zip in he's positioned everything with double-sided tape on these smaller pouches then what I've done also is grabbed all my webbing or strapping I've cut up 16 pieces and these are going to go into my larger bags so with the 16 larger bags I've cut my handles up and I'm going to position those in place on all of my bags now I'll sew those in and once I've done that I'll give these bags to my son and he can put the Zips in at the top I've got a real assembly line happening here and a little bit of cheap labor while my Sun's laid up on the couch so now I'm going to cut up all of my strapping attach that to all of my larger bags Luke still working on the Zips for the smaller pouches but I can also start sewing those in place as well one of the techniques I use for my batch sewing once I've cut up all the strapping that I have for one whole bag I'll then take each individual piece and cut that in half that way I don't have random sized pieces for 16 different bags if I do one at a time I can pair up these handles each time to place them on my fabric rather than measuring from the center and measuring out a certain amount of distance which is what I do with a single bag I'll grab a template or a ruler and I'll line up the straight edge along the top of my Fabric and and then I'll line a straight edge along the side of my box corner and I've already got a predetermined size so once I know what that is then I can just place my strapping in the same place every single time so in this case I've got a 4in line from the top down and 2 and 1/2 in from the side of the Box corner and I just pop a pin in place there then I'll move the ruler over slightly so that I've got that line marked there and I measure the same 2 and 1/2 in across and I can place my strapping in the correct position and then turn it around and I can do exactly the same thing from the other side measure down that four in and then 2 and 1/2 in from the outside edge so just move the position of my ruler each time and from the out if I measure from the outside edge of my box Corner this is where the top of my bag is going to be finished finished so I know my handles are going to be nicely centered across the bag it's a much easier way to do this when you're doing batch sewing you'll save so much time by not having to measure the center then measure out and down so I'll take each one of these to the machine I'll then do the folding and sewing as I go all the while keeping my Linings with it all right all of the handles are now in place for the box to bags so they've just been sewn around with a square on the corners of each and as I mentioned the lining stays together with each of the bags as I go along the next thing for me to do for these bags and my pouches is to put these Zips in for the small bag and the large ones this is where we're at we've put a strip of continuous tape along both edges placed that on the outer Fabric and then place the lining directly over the top so Luke's been busy doing this for the past couple of days and we've done exactly the same for the larger pieces as well now the larger bags they've got a box corner at the bottom and at the top here but these smaller ones they're going to be pouches I'm not exactly sure whether I'm going to be making box bags or pouches at this stage but I can do that later anyway but up until this point getting everything prepared ready for the Zips to be installed it's taken 7 and 1/2 hours I've used 16 m of webbing for the handles and I think about 4 and 1/2 M of continuous zip not to mention all the other bits and pieces but I am keeping a running total of how long everything takes me to do based on the prices that I think I'm going to get for my bags or the products that I think I'm making at the moment I need to get this under 20 hours so I've done 7 and 1/2 hours so far I've got to get my Zips done the Corner's boxed and all sorts of other things so I'm hoping that I can keep this job under 20 hours to be able to make it worth my while I should get there now I'll go and do all the Zips once I've inserted the zips on both sides I turn everything the right way around and then I'll go and top Stitch well I've had a really good run in the last 90 minutes I have put all the Zips in in all of the bags and pouches including uh these ones here that I don't know what I'm going to do with yet I've also top stitched all of them one of the things that makes the job really quick is not to have to change thread colors all the time so you can see I've got a mid green a really pale green charcoals uh salmon rust burgundy all sorts of different colors with every single one of these I've used one thread on the top and one thread for my linings for the Linings I've used cream for all of the fabric pie pieces regardless of what colors I had in the lining I think most of them had some kind of cream in the background and for the outer fabric for the top stitching I've used this um it's a sort of a bluish purple shade a Bluey purplish gray shade of blue um it's rent and the color is it's a rent 120 or Tex 24 and the color is 0355 so regardless of the brand because I usually use Gutman or aant thread you don't you don't have to go and use a perfect match for all of your fabric pieces most of the time I'll use this blue gray or even just a more pale gray and that tends to blend into the background of all of these fabric pieces so all the top stitching is completely finished I've now got to go and put all of these zipper pulls on I think and I'm feeling like being a cruel mom and teaching my son how to put them on right now I've got him sorting out different colored uh cam snaps or plastic press studs because I got a whole bunch in in lots of different colors giving him some work to do whilst he's laid up and I'm feeling nasty and I think I should teach him how to put these zipper pools on it can be a painful job sometimes but that's next I'm going to put one pull onto the smaller bags two onto these larger bags after I've done that I can start putting my side seams together and then boxing my Corners not much to go see if I can go and con my son into putting these pulls on with me okay so I've managed to get all of the zipper pulls onto my bags and then I've gone and turned all the fabric around so that I've got the outer Fabric and the lining separated from each other I've done that on the large bags and on these smaller pouches or bags as well and I think I've probably decided that I'm going to make these smaller ones a small version of The Box bags but I might have them uh but I might have the opening at the top a little bit smaller than the bottom and the reason I'm thinking about doing box bags instead of normal pouches is because I haven't put zipper tabs on I didn't want to put Zer tabs on today so to help prevent the corners from not sitting properly I'm going to give these smaller box Corners at least that's my plan right now I'll set this aside just for the moment because I'm still thinking about those for the bigger ones I'm going to take all of them to the machine sew up the side seams on the outer Fabric and on the lining and with the lining I'm going to leave an opening on one side now before I go on I just wanted to show you these are all of the fabric pieces left over from cutting out the box Corners at the bottom of my bags I haven't kept the ones from the top of the bag because they're Fair they're a fair bit smaller but I actually have a project idea in mind for all of these pieces so I'm keeping these aside just for the moment I've got an idea for a bag for these I might do that in a separate video but show you how this looks later so now to sew up all my side seams what I've done now are all of the side seams on all of the larger bags that I've that I'm working on and I've left an opening in the lining of one of the side seams so that I can turn everything through later on now that I've done all of these larger bags I need to box the corners so I'm going to box the bottom corners on each ones individually for the outer the lining and then for the U middle section or the top section where the zip is I'll be doing the lining and the outer fabric together so I will go and do all of those next with these I've been thinking about these smaller ones discovered I made a huge mistake with them I have to rethink what I was going to do I should have actually made a bag before I cut everything out so not to worry I'll work something out with those um I'll leave those aside for the time being and work on those a little bit later but for now it's back to boxing the corners so this is one I have done already I've boxed the bottom on the lining and the outer and then I've boxed the top section together this is now ready to be turned the right way around and have the side seam closed up and then the bag's finished nearly there all right I finally finished sewing up all of the really big boxed bags they've all been priced and tagged and put on my website so everything is completely done with those I can set that aside so far I've spent about 15 1/2 hours and that includes 2 hours of taking photos and uploading to my website all I have left to do is this here now I've had a bit of a dilemma with these because I should have actually tested one first before I cut out my box Corners so I've been playing around with a few different things that I can do with them this one here is just the wide box corner at the bottom with no boxing at the top this one here has a small box corner at the top and the wide one at the bottom and then this one here I've done the Box Corner the same size top and bottom looks a little bit squat to me and I really don't know which one is going to be the best bag to make out of these pieces so what I think I will do is make a couple of each or a few of each that way the customers can be the judge and they can decide which ones they like I also figured that if I made all the bags in this style and didn't sell any then I've wasted my entire time whereas if I have a few different sizes or a few different styles at least some of them will sell that's my theory anyway I'm not really happy with myself over these ones but that's hopefully a lesson learned I will go and finish these up I just had a look back at the footage from the beginning of the video and discovered that I started this project nearly 10 weeks ago so my mission today is to completely finish up all of these bags have everything priced and tagged and then I can just tell up how much this has all cost me in time and material so now I will go back and finish up the bags using whatever Styles I've got here so what I've done is turned all of my bag pieces inside out and separated the Linings all I have to do now is sew up all the sides and these ones here they were just Scrappy bits so they just need to be sewn up and closed up as well after making a few of these I've decided that I'm just going to go and box the corners at the top of the bag so if I grab the partially made bag here and just open that out rather than going to the trouble of measuring I have slightly measured what I'm doing is making a Mark 1 in from the outside edge here and I'm just going to cut straight down where I've already done my top stitching that means I've got my seam allowance along here somewhere so that means I'm only going to have a really small box corner at the top of my bag I'll cut this little section out on each end of the bag then I can have a narrower box corner at the top than what is at the base of the bag it'll save me a lot of time this way and it'll also give me much neater Corners at the top of the bag where the zip is with all the bags finished all I have to do now is turn everything the right way out and the last thing left for me to do will be to close up these openings I'm not sure if I'm optimistic or excited that I'm going to see how these bags all turned out I'm not really that hopeful that they're going to be very nice but even if I mark them down at a low price I think I'll still recover the time I've spent so I'll go and close up all those bags and see how they've all turned out I am so pleased to have finally finished these bags every single one of the little ones is completely finished now and I have to say I don't think they look as bad as I first thought uh I'm pleased that I decided rather than keeping big box Corners I've decided to have the wide bottom well I had no choice there but have a smaller bottom at the top but I'm happy now that I've decided just to make the smaller box Corners at the top of the bag it was going to be too difficult to have nice looking zip Ends by not doing anything to them at all so I think everything's worked out the way it's supposed to I will finish putting all these little tags on and then I can turn off my clock and work out exactly how long everything's taken me and what all my costs have been and we'll have a look at all of the bags together in a moment all right let's have a look and see how many bags we've got here well I can tell you how many we've got uh of the really big ones at the back which are the same as our soft boxy bags that I made in a previous video there's 16 of those and they're all pretty much the same size except for this teal one in the front row it's a little bit smaller and then what I've done is made a whole bunch of these little pouches there's two little box bags down here and the rest of them are the pouches that have the small box Corners at the top and The Wider box corner at the bottom I'll show you that one in a moment and again over here we've got the rest of them my aim with this project was not to waste any fabric at all and I think I've achieved success in that I've made this bag here out of all of the boxed Corner scraps so I have done a separate video for this project and I'll pop a link in the description below but all the Box Corners have been put into this bag here so there's been no wastage well there's been almost no wastage for this entire project so let's go and have a look and see how long it's all taken me and what it's cost me well I don't know about you but I am certainly pleased that that job is over and done with I've spent almost 3 months working on these and even before then I had the fabric just sitting there waiting for me to do something with it it's really just been taking up a lot of space in my dining room and in my sewing room I'm so glad I can finally put everything into the shop for this weekend uh let's talk about how long it took me and what my expenses were and whether or not I've met my target when I first started making these bags I had in mind that I was going to sell these ones for $35 because I had sold my last lot at that price now they sold really well and they sold a little bit too quickly so these ones they're a little bit bigger I'm going to sell them for $45 instead of 35 and the small pouches I had in my mind that I wanted $25 each for them so based on how many I knew I was going to be able to make I had a Target set for 21 hours to get the whole project finished I'm pleased that it's come well under that in fact it took me 18 hours from from the start of the project all the way to the end where I've put on the little tabs at the end of the Zips I've reduced my time costs down by 3 hours which was good because I was a little bit disappointed in how my pouches have turned out I'm fine with these they're just cute little boxy bags I've only got two of those and they're fine they're perfectly well balanced I'm happy with those I'm going to charge $15 for these there's only two of them now the bigger pouches I ended up deciding on having the small box corner at the top because the big box Corner was just way too much and not having anything at all didn't really look nice uh and it was easier to actually construct it with a box corners and in my mind I'd initially wanted $25 for each of them and for most of them I'll still actually get that so I'm happy about that there are a few now let me look at my list I ended up having 11 pouches that I can sell at $25 or in mind I can sell at $25 each and I've got three pouches that I consider too ugly to be $25 so I'm just making those $15 each it's probably just me they're probably still perfectly capable of getting $25 but I'm not really that fond of them so $15 it is for the other three based on the dollar figure that I was going to get for all of my bags as I said I needed to get the time within 21 hours and now that my prices have been adjusted somewhat I went through a period for a while where I thought that I wasn't even going to get $15 for these ones I really had to get the amount of hours down that I put into this so I was lucky that I managed to get that down to 18 but I was pleasantly surprised that these ones have turned out okay now let me start with all of the expenses and my costs and a little bit about how I price things all of the fabric that I've used in all of these bags including the lining fabric was given to me for free so I didn't have to pay for any of that fabric now I know some people think that even though I get the fabric for free I should charge for it because it takes time for me to process it remove labels and things like that but I do actually take that time into account my personal view is that if I get something for free I should pay it forward so the customer will never pay for the fabric that I don't pay for the fabric on the outside and on the inside was free to me so therefore it's free to the customer they do pay for the time it takes me to neaten the fabric uh the time it takes me to remove any adhesive labels that might be on there just generally getting the fabric ready for me to be able to make a sailable product so even though the fabric is free my processing time is not here's what I did pay for the webbing that I use for my handles I used 16 M all up I paid for the the Zips and I used 4 and 1/2 M of Zips and I think I used 40 I used about 40 zip sliders some of the bags have two sliders and others have one and then I used 48 of these little tags on the end of my zip uh my labels every one of the bags has a label at least on the outside and some of them have labels on the inside as well so these are I tried and true Stitch this label they've got handmade in the gambi which is the town that we're in Stitch this is the name of my business and then it's got a link to my website on there as well I also have some bags that have got my faux leather label on there and that says Christine made it so with those bags I've also put my business details on the inside so no matter who sees these bags you're always going to be able to find out where they came from so that's both types of labels oh um the biggest thing that I used was the Paran which was the fleecy stabilizer that I've used inside all of these I used 6 and 1/2 M of that and I stood here for a couple of hours I've got to say I love my heat press it just saved so much time and shoulder work so it took me a couple of hours to use the heat press and fuse all of the stabilizer onto every single scrap of fabric that I had as I said at the beginning of the video my was to use up every piece of fabric and not have any wastage so the total cost of goods that I've had to purchase to make all of these bags was $100 it was just a little bit under $100 I've rounded it up that includes everything that I've used in these bags now there are consumables that I've used like double-sided tape um my rotary cutter blade I put a new blade in at the beginning and it very soon went blunt uh thread I went through lots of thread those consumables are factored into my labor rate and my labor rate is $45 an hour I have a flat rate that I charge out for any work that I do in the shop whether it be making bags or doing alterations So currently it's $45 I haven't reviewed it for a couple of years and I'm actually planning on doing that this week so it might go up a fair bit but at the moment I'm happy with $45 and that takes into account my consumables that I've already mentioned but it also covers uh taxes subscriptions uh Internet fees uh website fees super annuation power machine maintenance you know all of those sorts of things have been factored into my $45 an hour labor rate that also includes a minimum hourly rate in Australia of about $26 per hour if I were working in a shop getting paid to sew so $26 an hour is my minimum hourly rate but then I've added everything else to that to cover all my consumables and power and all of those kinds of things insurance and everything like that so I think I've waffled on enough how did I go it took me 18 hours to make the bags at $45 that was $810 worth of Labor and consumables to make all of these bags so I have 16 of these large soft box bags at $45 each $720 I have two of these cute little box bags $15 each so that's $330 I have 11 of these pouches that aren't terribly ugly they are $25 each and then I have another three pouches that I consider to be ugly and they're only going to be $15 each so that's $45 so of all of those bags and I think that worked out to be 32 bags that turns out to be $1,070 in products that I've got to sell today and then I've got one more bag and that is this one here I'm really pleased with this I haven't yet decided if I'm going to sell this bag it's been made up using the Box corners from all of these bags that we've made and all I had left were four little pieces and I just cannot find those four pieces anywhere so all I had left in fabric was just four little pieces of wastage well they're around here somewhere they'll get used but I'm really happy that I've managed to get another bag made out of all of those box Corner ends and that one I've just pulled a figure out of my head of $125 I could probably get a lot more for this G given that it's uh a oneoff bag and it's a little bit interesting in the fact that it's completely made out of uh scrap fabric with 32 bags that comes to $1,070 if I add this one here it'll be $1 1225 so that brings it to $1,195 worth of stock that I've got to sell in the shop Let's round that up to $1,200 just to make it easier so $1,200 worth of stock and the total value of my expenses including my labor cost was $910 in my labor rate I consider most of that to be profit I allow myself that $26 for a wage anything on top of that is just profit so $910 worth of costs with labor and cost of goods and a potential resale figure of $1,200 I think that's pretty good so even with the profits that I make in my labor rate I'm still going to be making an extra $300 on top of all of that time that I haven't had to use I hope all that's made sense I feel like this project has just gone on and on and on kind of reminds me of that old lamb chop song Do You Dare me to sing it this is a Song That Never Ends look it up look it up this is a Song That Never Ends uh with lamb chop and I can't remember the lady's name that sung the song but look I'm I think I'm a little bit Delirious because I've made too many of these bags I'm so glad it's finally finished I really hope you guys have enjoyed this video um I I think by now you you have noticed that this wasn't an actual tutorial this was me showing you my processes in how to do batch sewing and how to get the most out of my Fabric and just have a little bit of a think uh about what I'm going to do and you know the mistakes that I've nearly made or did make along the way if you want to make any of these bags I will pop a link in the description below and I'll try and remember to put a link in the comment section as well we've got the soft box bag here and we've just got some little pouches and small boxed bags so I'll find the video links for those the fabric will be different of course but the techniques will be the same and also this one here this bag made out of all scrap fabric I'll pop a link down below for all of those videos if you want to go back and have a look and see how to make these yourself I really hope you've enjoyed this video do let me know what you think I love all your comments and I shall catch you next time bye for now

Channel: Christine's Home Affairs

Views: 14,504

Keywords: sewing, quilting, sew to sell, upcycle sewing, dressmaking, pattern drafting, learn to sew, beginner sewing

Id: KFcdwQuU6L4

Length: 36min 0sec (2160 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2024