I love these bags in the Somerset Magazine. I thought they would make perfect photo gift bags with a few modifications. I’m thinking of using these in my business to wrap gifts, gift cards, etc. but you can use them to bring your own family life art wrapped up!

I bought a few yards of White Cotton Muslin fabric. It was $1.99/yd not on sale, so an incredibly cost effective way to present a unique gift. You can either use an iron on transfer paper to transfer a printed image to a piece of fabric, or follow this DIY way to print using a common kitchen item, which is how I printed the image in the picture above.

TRANSFERRING IMAGE TO FABRIC
1) Using a standard sheet of printer paper, trace and cut a piece of freezer paper. Trace and cut the same size piece of muslin cotton fabric.
2) Iron the fabric to the shiny side of the freezer paper. Cut off any lose strands of material to make sure they don’t get caught in the paper.
3) Feed one sheet of fabric paper at a time through printer to print directly on fabric. I found the best way was to print the image on the bottom half of the sheet. The paper seemed to get caught when it had to print right at the top of the paper. This way it fed half of the sheet through first before printing. If I wanted 2 images per sheet, I printed the first image on the bottom, turned the paper around and fed the sheet through again.
4) Remove freezer paper backing from fabric and iron out fabric again.

I trimmed the fabric photo to size and frayed the edges by pulling at the end strings.

In the meantime I cut out two same sized pieces of the same cotton muslim fabric. Mine ended up being about the size of an 8×10 sheet of paper.

Using a brightly colored thread, I sewed the transferred image onto one of the pieces of fabric in a messy circle and went around twice.

I pinned and hemmed the top of each piece of fabric, fit them together with the image sandwiched in the middle of the two pieces and sewed around the edge of the two pieces leaving the top of the pouch open. I actually decided to add a button flap to my pouch so I cut out two smaller pieces of fabric the same width as the bag and sewed along the edges leaving a small opening to be able to turn the small pieces of fabric inside out revealing the clean edges. I sewed this piece of fabric to the top of the back piece of fabric to my bag creating that messy 2nd hem line on the top of the bag.

Then to add the button I cut a button hole in the position I wanted and started hand stitching around the button hole since my sewing machine is missing that handy feature. I sewed the button on in position and that was it! I love the way it turned out!

This bag is going to go with one of my gift certificates for a client, which by the way make for great holiday gifts coming up!