West Mitten Crafts: Plastic bag holders and the truth about younger sewers

I decided to make a plastic bag holder for my Mom as part of her birthday present this year. She had said that she liked the last bag holder I made, and I can recall many instances in which the plastic bags would have to be held into the pantry closet while closing the door while I was growing up. This time, I chose to follow a pattern and use enough fabric, as the bag holder I made for myself doesn't actually fit a whole lot of bags. I found the tutorial for a 20 minute grocery bag holder on the Craftiness is not Optional blog. This tutorial was very detailed and easy to follow.

Fabric trued up, cut to size, pinned, sewed, and pressed.

While sewing the first seam, I realized that I was just using my standard seam allowance instead of the allowance called for in the pattern. Since this is supposed to have a French seam, I'm guessing that the called for seam allowance is set that way for a reason.

This awareness of fudging the pattern made me chuckle to myself. In one discussion during a recent machine owners class at the Smith Owen Sewing Center this exact topic came up. One of the participants was asking if there was a foot or marking on the plate that would make it easy to get a consistent 5/8" seam allowance for sewing clothes. This digressed into a conversation about how younger sewers don't necessarily play by the old sewing rules when it comes to seam allowances and the like. Being relatively new to sewing, I didn't really have an opinion on the subject. And here I am, less than 24 hours later, basically just winging it and only loosely following the pattern. I guess they were right.

So I measured my normal stitch, where I just line up the edge of the fabric with the side of the foot, and amazingly enough, it's 3/8". Since I managed to do this right so far, I decided to continue and actually try to follow the directions.

5/8" seam measured and sewed. That is a huge seam allowance! First French seam complete.

Next up, the bottom and top edges are folded and pressed to create a casing for the elastic.

A piece of ribbon is attached to one edge to create a loop for hanging the finished holder.

Then these casings are sewn, leaving a small opening to pull the elastic through.

I used a safety pin to pull the elastic, with a pin on the other end of the elastic so that the whole piece did not get pulled through.

I did find that it is easier to pull the elastic through so that it would go past the side seam in the same direction the seam was pressed down. When I tried to pull the elastic through the bulk of the seam first, the pin had to be adjusted several times to get around all of the layers, as it wanted to go into the middle of the seam and would then have nowhere to go.

Once the elastic was pulled through, I sewed the two ends together. This was a horribly fiddly step. Any suggestions on how to do this more efficiently?