Small Drawstring Bag

Mom suggested I make everyone's Christmas presents this year, so I'm going to try it! Today I made a little bag using this "fabric gift pouch" tutorial from A Spoonful of Sugar. I tweaked the directions slightly as I went along, so I'm going to show how I made it. (It's still very close to the original.) The bag took me about 2 hours overall, but a lot of that is from hand-sewing.

It's a little tinier than I expected ... 

The post is really image-heavy, so I'm putting it under a cut.

Materials:

• two 8.5" x 8.5" squares of fabric. I used some fabric quarters from Jo-Ann's that have the same pattern but two different colors. 
• thread
• ~2 feet of thin ribbon or yarn, cut into two pieces

I changed what I was using for the drawstring twice, so sorry about the photo inconsistencies ;; 

So once the squares were cut out, I lined them up with the right sides together and sewed them together with a 1/2" allowance, leaving ~3 inches open on one side. The pencil shows where I stopped since it wouldn't show up well in the picture. 

Then I cut the extra fabric around the corners and turned it right side out. The bottom right was the open end. 

The edges looked like this after I ironed it. 

 I sewed around the edges using a thicker thread, but it's totally optional. I did it because I liked how it looked in the tutorial. This was what took the most time, so it would be a lot quicker to make if you skipped it or did the decorative stitches with a sewing machine. 

Then I measured 3 1/4" from each of the corners and put pins there to mark it (which I forgot to take a picture of). I folded the corners down to the pins and ironed them down. 

I sewed the corners down about a half inch from the edge.

I used a crochet hook to get the ribbon through. The two ribbons get thread through opposite corners so when you pull on them, they pull the bag closed.

I messed up a little bit at this point because I thought the blue fabric was going to be the inside, so I couldn't get the bag to close correctly. I re-did it with yarn instead and realized that I was trying to close it inside-out.

It's not supposed to look like this. 

So if you thread it the same way as the picture, make sure to turn the bag inside out so the side facing you is on the outside!

This is what it's supposed to look like! The corners are supposed to stick out when you close it. 

So this is what it looks like finished! This one doesn't have anything in it. I put a couple flash drives in the first picture to get a sense of how much it could hold. It could hold a little jewelry box, I think, like one for rings. Or little candies like Hershey Kisses. 

This was a lot of fun to make! It took a while to put together, but I'm really proud of how it turned out. I think I'm going to try to make bigger ones in the future.