Square bag for a square game

Well, Terraria isn't as overwhelmingly square as Minecraft, but...um...

Yeah.

I made another bag.

I can hear the music now (I mean, not just because it's playing on a computer in the next room.)


The kiddo's assortment of Terraria toys is growing--he'll very likely have every Terraria action figure by his birthday--and he's being strict about not mixing them with the Minecraft stuff, so I decided it was time to make some sort of Terraria-exclusive storage solution.

And I didn't start with the idea of the tree appliqué--I thought the 'kinda looks like exploding stuff' print would be good enough, but, to no-one's surprise, I decided...why not make it more complicated...  I cut the trunk and leaf shapes completely freehand, no effort to accurately scan, scale, or sketch them, aaaannnd I used the only solid brown and medium green I had in my stash, so the colors are definitely not screen accurate, but, if you know Terraria, you know this tree.

 

The back of the bag, however, from the start I'd wanted to have a big simple zippered pocket, which I was prepared to do all straightforward-like, but, then...hmmm, why not throw together some quick bias trim with more of the brown cloth? ("Do you mean piping?"  Ehhh...if I had some nice cording to put inside, then, yes, I would have meant piping, but, since I didn't have any appropriate cording, then...no, I don't mean piping.)  And then put that bias-trim-that-isn't-piping along both sides of the zipper opening, as well as all around the front and back.

All of the zippers used in this bag are yellow, a color chosen entirely because I have a lot of yellow zippers (which are what's left of a great deal Mom got on a great deal of zippers somewhere around 1980.  Yeah.)  This pocket is lined with some leafy brown calico I got in a thrift store fabric grab bag (it was not one of the prints in the assortment that prompted me to buy it.)

The yellow zipper isn't too terribly dis-harmonious...

I'll go ahead and talk about the strap, which was the last thing made and its design is based primarily on the fact that, at that point, all I had left of the blue burst print (which I believe was a remnant, from way back when I still shopped at Hobby Lobby) was the strip torn off one edge in an effort to straighten it.  So.  Narrow and angled.  I sewed brown to the edges and folded the assembled pieces and laid a folded side piece over each one and cut around them to make them square-ish, then connected those both to the green strip because I was feeling weird about there being so much of the (trunk) brown abut absolutely no other instances of the (leaf) green.  Then I folded that piece in half one way then in half the other way and cut it so it was as wide as the sides on the ends and narrower in the center.  Then I used that to cut out the pieces used for the underside of the strap...which had to be pieced together, too, because have I mentioned this was the last thing I put together before assembling the whole thing?  (And do I need to mention that I was working without any plan beyond "Make a bag for the Terraria stuff"?  Yeah, I didn't think I needed to mention that.)  I was also out of large pieces of the synthetic twill I've been using in bags (for years) so I just used a bit of otherwise-unwanted cloth inside the strap in an attempt to give it some more body.

Anyway. (And, yep, I used the brown bias strips on either side of the top zipper, too.)

I had only a fat quarter of the leafy brown print used inside the big back pocket, and that pocket used most of the print, so I had to decide what else to use inside the rest of the bag.  Again, I chose a thrift store grab bag print of which I wasn't particularly enamored, and that I'd always thought would be good to use for something for the kiddo, but there wasn't quite enough to make a button-up shirt, and, oh, what a loud shirt that would have been

The selvage would have you believe it's a Christmas print, too.  Ha.

And look inside--another yellow zipper!

This is the second attempt to insert the zipper into a slash.  We won't discuss the first attempt, not beyond "Hmm, y'know, I might never actually have done this before..."

The inner pocket is lined with the leafy brown, and...even though I did intentionally choose the browns of the leafy print to coordinate with the browns of the blue burst print but did not at all think of the bright stripey print as anything but something-I-have-enough-of...they don't look so bad together?  Possibly helped by the fact that the zippers do match the yellow stripes.  Also possibly proving my "If you sew it together, it goes together" theory of print mixing.

The bag ended up being about 11" square by 4" deep (of course I didn't measure anything when ripping apart the pieces.)  The last large bit of the synthetic twill is behind the front appliqué piece, with smaller pieces of the twill inside the bottom and in the top around the zipper.  There's a piece of mildly heavy broadcloth in the back, although not in the pocket pieces themselves, and the sides are only exterior and lining fabrics.  The whole thing has some shape, but is overall pretty soft.

The kiddo was a bit sick when I finished it, and he was very happy to see it.  All of his current Terraria toys (that we could find) are inside, and he's feeling much better now.  (And Husband would like to emphasize that these photos are taken on the neighbors' fence, as he is vexed by that short post left over from their previous fence.)

The next thing I plan to sew is a bag for his Angry Birds toys...