Wet bags for baby

Thursday I shipped off my most recent baby gift - these wet bags. They are fabric bags lined in vinyl so that mom can throw dirty clothes, shoes, diapers etc. in them and keep the rest of the contents of the diaper bag dry. I had heard about wet bags that were lined with solid colored vinyl fabric, but I really wanted to line mine with a coordinating fabric that you could see. My first idea was to use a clear shower curtain over the inner fabric. When I went to the fabric store I found some clear vinyl sold by the yard, but they only had the really thin or really thick versions in stock. Then, as I was gathering my applique supplies, I spotted some iron-on vinyl! So, that is what I ended up using. The fabric is Robots by David Walker from Common Threads Quilt Shoppe.

My first attempt was the red bag. I made the inner bag taller than the outer so that I could cuff it over and put the draw-string in. I love the way this one looks with the shiny cuff, but as you can see, it just doesn't cinch up very well. You have to work with the draw string a little to get it very snug. I figure the functionality of being able to easily shut the bag will be more important to a mom dealing with a mess than the cute shiny appearance. So...

Attempt number 2 was the blue bag. This one I made the inner vinyl coated bag the same size as the outer and then added a separate non-vinyl cuff for the draw string. I had some trouble with this because the vinyl is slippery and the bag just barely fit over the base of my sewing machine. I needed to pin it, but didn't want to poke holes in the vinyl so I tried using binding clips like you would to attach binding to a quilt, but they ended up sliding around. So, the stitching on the cuff isn't the best. However, it does cinch shut quite nicely.

Final attempt - striped bag. This time I used a similar method as the blue bag, but I sewed the cuff to the inner bag before putting it together and then folded it over so that it held in place better. This worked much better, but I thought I was being clever by making the inner bag a little bit smaller (width) so that it fit inside the other bag better, but that meant that it was hard to make the cuff fold over the larger outer bag. Again, the stitching on the cuff is not as nice as I would like. But, the good news is, this was also my first time to try applique and I think it was pretty good for my first attempt (if I do say so myself!). I followed the instructions by Elizabeth from Oh, Fransson! on Sew, Mama, Sew!. It was pretty straight forward with such good instructions! I have a feeling I will be doing that again!

I did wash and dry the red bag in my washer and dryer. It seemed okay, but I was worried about the vinyl separating from the fabric so I turned it inside out, covered it in parchment paper and ironed it again to be sure they were still fused. I think it is okay to wash and dry if needed, but they will probably last longer if they are just wiped out or hand washed most of the time. Hopefully, these will be useful bags. I would love to hear some suggestions on how to make these better. I might make more in the future, and am also considering using vinyl coated fabric to line a makeup bag.