No-Sew Bags

As the summer holiday begins I am beginning 6 weeks of blogging with my children.

We shall do a craft a week and let you know how it goes. I hope it inspires some of you to have a go with your children as we are already having fun crafting together!

This week we are making no-sew bags for them to keep their holiday things in. Here are the girls ready to get going!

Firstly I printed off some letters. I choose a font and then enlarged it to size 500. On your computer you can choose to print fonts as they are or just as an outline. To save ink I choose to print just the outline of the letters. You can see Billy's B here…

The children choose scrap fabric from my selection, a big enough piece that their letter could be copied on.

Then, lay a sheet of bondaweb the same size as the fabric on an ironing board and lay your fabric facing upwards on top. Iron them together for about 10 seconds. Bondaweb will act like double sided sticky tape and can be bought very cheaply from any haberdashery shop.

I carefully supervised the children as they ironed their fabric to the bondaweb, which gave them all a great sense of achievement.







Once your bondaweb is ironed on you are left with a paper back to your fabric.

Now cut out your printed letter and draw around it onto your bondaweb paper side. Don't forget to reverse the image so that when you cut it out it is the right way around.

You can draw straight onto the bondaweb paper and it doesn't matter if you make a mistake as you won't see it anyway!

Let your children have a go at cutting around the letter. You can always make it neater if you want, but it is so lovely to see them succeed.

Billy did a great job cutting his out, though I did need to help with the holes in the middle.






Your child can now peel the backing off the bondaweb to reveal a thin layer of glue.

Here is Molly ready to stick her M to the next piece of fabric. We have used a brightly coloured felt to back the shape onto. The felt adds colour and texture.

Position it as you want and then iron over it all to stick it together. The bondaweb must be warmed thoroughly, and as the felt is thicker you may need to hold your iron in place for longer.

You can back each shape as many times as you fancy. The important thing to remember about bondaweb is to iron it on before you cut out the shape.

If you cut out a shape before the bondaweb is stuck to the material you run the danger of ironing your bondaweb to the ironing board or to the iron…

The children have added felt layers until they are happy with the look they get. Then we used hessian bags that cost 99p from Hobbycraft and added one final layer of bondaweb to iron the finished shape onto the front of the bag.

Here are the children and their finished bags. We had a lovely morning and the children are so proud of their work. Each bag was well under £2 to make and it was a perfect for children aged 5+.