Zinnias- Happy Happy Bags

Hi, fellow creatives! Luci here from Sea Garden Sewing, sharing one of my latest quilty projects using Lila Tueller‘s Zinnias! Packed with a variety of florals patterns in vibrant colors, working with this fabric collection is sure to get you out of a winter slump.

For this project, I made three of Sweet Cinnamon Roses‘ Happy Happy Bags as gifts for others. It was honestly hard to pair outside and lining fabrics, because all of the prints look so good with each other!

To maximize focus on the prints, I did a simple diamond quilted pattern with white thread. I used my Juki’s Quilt Guide for Even Feed Foot to measure lines 1″ apart without needing to mark lines with a water-soluble or hera marker.

Here are the quilted panels with their respective lining fabrics:

I selected three zippers from the Lori Holt Happy Zippers and Happy Zippers 2 pack to coordinate with the prints. Because the zippers were much longer than the panels, I was able to move the zipper pulls completely out of the way when I sewed the panels to the zipper.

Somewhere in the middle of the project I found myself confused on how to layer the quilted panels, zipper, and lining fabrics in the correct orientation before sewing. This was at no fault of the pattern- I just struggle sometimes with bag construction as I’m newer to this side of sewing. I was quickly comforted by learning that Sweet Cinnamon Roses has a Youtube Tutorial for the Happy Happy Bag, which put me at ease and made me confident in proceeding through the pattern.

After some more layering, folding, pressing, and top stitching, it’s time to box out the corners. This was definitely the most fiddly step for me, so I broke it into multiple sessions (boxing out 8 small corners for three boxes each tested my patience a bit).

Once the corners were boxed, it was smooth sailing to turn the bags inside out and sew up the linings. Here are the finished bags:

As a quilter first and bag maker second, I’m always trying to expand my horizons and try new bag/pouch patterns. I’ve sewn multiple projects from Sweet Cinnamon Roses and have very good things to say about them- especially the videos detailing each step. If you’d like to follow along with my future quilting projects, you can follow me on Instagram at @SeaGardenSewing.