Project 2: Animals of the Rainforest - Step 5

Since my end goal is a cut-and-sew pattern that will fit on one yard of fabric including the instructions (thanks to Spoonflower for putting together a contest that would motivate me to finish what I started!!), I needed to figure out how big each panel would need to be in order for this to work.

A single yard, for those who have never done this, is 36 wide x 42 high.  I settled on front and back panels being 16"x16" each, side panels being 8"x16" each, a bottom panel of 16"x8", and two straps that were 5"x22" each.  This gave me plenty of room for instructions and made the bag sufficiently large enough to be useful as a shopping bag in addition to a tote bag, reusable gift bag, or even a purse.

I built the seam allowances I wanted in to each panel so that it would be harder for people who purchased the pattern to make mistakes by adding a colored border around each piece.  This also helped the pieces to stand out from one another once cut out.  Each edge was labeled to match up with the one it was to be sewn to in order to make it easier.
Finally, it was time to assemble each piece and put the instructions together.  In order to test that the edges were marked correctly, I created a half-size version of the bag out of paper and scotch tape using the techniques I would give in the instructions.  Confident that everything worked correctly, I finally finished putting together the cut-and-sew pattern, just in time to upload it to Spoonflower's bag contest!!

Here is a small version of the finished piece:



I hope to have pictures of the actual bag in the next few weeks :)