Finished! Circle Bag for Rotating mat

I have at least 2 recent quilts finished, but took a break to finish up some other stuff. My job gets a bit busy in the summer, so I wanted to organise, before it gets too out of hand. What better way to organise than to finish up some abandoned projects?

Then my computer crashed a couple of times, and I decided it was time for a new hard drive. When I removed the old ones [yes, I had 3 drives stuffed in there] they were dated 2006, 2008, and 2011, so I guess it was just time. Sew while windoze was loading, and updating, and updating, and updating . . . I cleaned, and sewed.

The first one was this bag. Way back when, I made a bag for my rotating cutting mat, but didn’t like the zipper. I removed it, [Rip As You Go?], but did nothing else to it , until it taunted me into submission. Or maybe hubby wanted his office chair back. Anyway, it’s done!

I am sew loving this 22″ long double zipper!

A couple notes on how I did it:

I measured the mat, then added 1 1/2″ to the diameter. That makes 15 1/2 so I made a circle that big, and used it for my template. Then I quilted the pieces to some heavy interfacing. Same for pockets, except I made a cut out, trimmed with bias binding to finish. I added the handles to the bag inside the pockets to hide the attachment.

I installed the zipper into 4 strips 2 /12″ wide and about 2″ longer than the zipper. This zipper panel turned out to be 5″ wide. I added heavy interfacing and quilted it, too.

Then I took the diameter of the quilted circles, subtracted 1″ for the two 1/2″ seam allowances, and used Pie [3.14] to get the circumference which was just under 48″. After that, I made the last panel the same width as the one containing the zipper, and added it to make the circle measure 48″ I used a ton of pins to attach my ring, one side at a time.