Foldover Cross-Body Bag

I am so happy with this cross-body bag I made! If you’ve got a keen eye, you’ll see I’ve once again used the MCM atomic prints created by Joe of Ambient Wares – you can download it for free >here< and see the adorable MCM plant stands they made with it! They even have hairpin legs!

Printing on Fabric with a laser printer!

I printed their designs on fabric using a black & white laser printer.

So what you do is tear off a piece of freezer paper and with your iron set to highest setting (which unless you have a commercial/professional iron is nothing) and the steam off, press the shiny side of your freezer paper to your fabric.

Once it’s attached, trim your fabric/paper sandwich to either letter (8.5″ x 11″) or legal sized (8.5″ x 14″). I used legal for the bag. Go over all the edges again with your iron making sure it’s firmly attached together all the way around. Be especially certain at the edge that will feed into the printer.

Use a sticky lint roller to make sure there are no loose threads or lint on the side you are printing. Set your printer to print best quality and using your bypass tray, print your design on the fabric. The freezer paper backing should just peel away.

I did some test pieces and washed them to test if the design would be colorfast. I discovered as long as you go over the design with a hot iron first to set it, on my fabric the design stayed through washing.

Making the cross body bag.

This is just an overview, I want to tweak the pattern and test it a bit more before I do a full tutorial, but I purchased 1/2 meter each of my 3 different fabric choices.

I had already drafted my pattern the night before, so I pinned everything out and cut my pieces.

With no clear right or wrong side, I kept questioning if I had it right. I expected the pieces to look more like the pieces of a puzzle when they were side by side.

I interfaced the exterior fabrics and pocket linings with fusible interfacing. There was a time I would have had black interfacing for my dark fabric, this time I had only white and it worked out fine.

I attached my accent piece to the top of each plain piece to make the front and back of the bag.

Then I marked out the zipper placement on the pocket lining.

Here is the lining turned to the inside of the bag.

How it looks on the outside. More lighting would have been nice!

Zipper placement!

Pin the bag at the corners and seams, right sides together. Don’t sew the notch between the pins.

Press everything open.

Shift the fabric around, seams together and sew across the notch to shape the bottom of the bag.

Here I’m inserting the zipper and interior pocket.

You sew it into a pocket after inserting the zipper. Once I had the zipper in, I sewed the lining together in the same way as the exterior, but with an opening left in the side for turning.

The strap is adjustable so you can use it as a regular purse but I prefer the convenience of a cross-body bag. I love this sparkly webbing.

Here you can see how the exterior pocket is under the flap. I love how nicely the lines & dots atomic pattern and the lining fabric play together.

The buckle is rather cool, even if the quality was somewhat disappointing.

I’m so happy with the way this cross-body bag came together! I can’t wait to share the pattern and a full tutorial with you!

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