Giant Beach Bag

Hello! It has been awhile...how's your summer going? We have been pretty busy with trips to the lake and down to Long Island to see family. It has been a lot of fun so far and we have more trips and activities planned so sewing has been slow here. I did get to sew a couple of things last week. It was very rainy here, so I was able to spend some quality time with my sewing machine and work on a project that was needed. With all the trips to the lake and all the towels and stuff that goes along with it, I really needed a bigger bag to haul everything in. I was shoving our towels and blanket and snacks into a pretty small bag that I used when it was just me traveling to the beach!

I had some fabric in my stash that I knew I wanted to use and I wanted the bag to be large enough to hold four towels and our beach blanket. I wanted to add some pockets to the outside for easy access to the sunscreen, swimmies and for any shells or rocks the kids decided they had to keep! Plus, I wanted a bag that I could throw into the wash along with the towels. I stacked my towels and blanket, measured the pile to get the dimensions for my bag and did a quick little sketch of how I wanted the bag to look. Then went to bed trying to figure out how the heck I was going to sew it together! The next morning I woke up, got the kids breakfast, made myself a cup of coffee and settled down to catch up on the blogs I follow still baffled as to how I was going to sew my bag together. It was as if the sewing gods were answering my prayers because there in my feed was a post from Steph at girl. Inspired saying she was guest posting at i heart naptime with an over sized beach bag tutorial! Sah-weeet! The beach bag was even bigger than the one I had drawn which was great and she had easy to follow instructions on how to put the bag together. I made a few changes to the design so it matched the bag I had originally sketched. Instead of the interior zip pocket that Steph added, I added the two exterior pockets from my sketch to either side of the bag. I also constructed the straps differently than she did. Instead of the straps being sandwiched between the exterior and interior pieces, I added the straps after the bag was constructed so that they were visible on the exterior of the bag. I did start out with the same dimensions that Steph had but I cut my pocket pieces the wrong size so I had to change the size of the bag. It was not a big deal though and my bag still holds a lot of stuff!

two large pockets for storage

fits all our gear perfectly

 



all packed and ready to go!

I am so glad that I found this tutorial! This bag is just what I needed for hauling all our gear to the lake or to my in-laws pool!

Thanks for stopping by!
Meghan

p.s. it is already day two of KCW! head on over to see some awesome inspiration and guest posts. i better get a move on ;)