Productive Herringbone Pouch Weekend

I have company coming this week and needed to get my house cleaned this weekend, but really had a desire to get some serious sewing done. So I budgeted my time, and told myself that if I accomplished what I needed to in housecleaning on Saturday, I could sew the rest of the weekend.

I started out friday night by selecting fabrics for six pouches. I had made one last week with this herringbone panel and batik scraps and wanted to make some out of Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics. So I dug into some charm packs that I’ve been holding onto. . . I thought this would be a great way to use that variety of fabric. I also made one from batiks left over from a quilt I made for a friend, and a batik charm pack.

These herringbone panels go together really fast. I got 12 done on Friday night… enough for six pouches.

For the herringbone panel, I followed this tutorial from Craftsy.  The tutorial has you cut your strips 1.5 inches by 4 inches. I used charm squares, so my strips were 5 inches long. My panels ended up too tall for my pouches. They would have looked odd and there wouldn’t have been much of the body fabric showing at the bottom of the pouch. So I cut about 1/5 inch off of the top and bottom of each panel to make it fit better. When I do these panels again, I’ll cut the pieces to 4 inches.

I continued adding strips to the panels until the panel was long enough that I could cut a piece 12 inches long and the width I wanted. With the five inch strips, I initially cut them 6 inches wide. And later cut them down to 5 inches, so they finished at 4.5 inches high, which makes a good proportion for the pouch.

Warning; These panels, when done, are all on the bias, so they stretch like crazy! Be very careful when working with them to not stretch them out of shape.

Once the panels were done, I decided which body fabric I’d use for each one. I decided to just use my beige linen and blue chambray.

To construct the pouch, I used my basic pouch pattern, according to my zipper pouch tutorial here. 

Once I got my house cleaning done on Saturday… and met a friend for dinner… and did some Thanksgiving grocery shopping, I dug in and started preparing body and lining pieces. I started constructing the pouch sides and was productive enough to get one side of each pouch pinned to the zipper and lining… all ready to start sewing the zippers on Sunday.

Once the zippers were in and the topstitching was done, It was time to quilt. I quilted all twelve panels in the same session. They are small, and it goes really fast if you’re not having any issues with your machine.

The lining is fused to the batting and I used spray basting to adhere the front pieces to the batting for quilting. I did the walking foot quilted lines at the bottom of the panel first, and then quilted the panels using a basic meander for each panel. I used my Bernina stitch regulator for the free motion quilting.

Once the quilting was done, I finished the pouches according to my tutorial.

I’m really happy with how they turned out. I’m excited to try different fabric combinations with this herringbone pattern.