bikini washing bag

… the zip on my old lingerie washing bag finally gave up the ghost, so I whipped up a new one!  Perforated sports fabric has been in Le Stash for years, I originally bought a long length of this from the Remnant Warehouse for raincoat vents and I think it’s going to last me a lifetime! purple zip inherited from a large batch of random haberdashery from Mum…

After I’d cut it out I decided to tizzy it up a bit with a spot of embroidery… I was going for the bikini emoji so tried embroidering yellow French knot “polka dots” over the pink but they sadly turned absolutely terrible so OFF they came!  It’s ok, I happen to think the pink bikini by itself is super cute and I’m very pleased with it.  I was little worried the satin stitch would skew in the wash, but it’s survived several washes already and come out totally unscathed so I think it’s going to be quite stable!

To do the embroidery, I freehand drew the bikini straight onto my bag with lead pencil.  The sports fabric is a little stretchy, so on the back (inside) of the bag I pinned a bias cut piece of white linen.  This provides a stable “tough” layer to give the embroidery a nice strong backing, so it won’t stretch out.

I outlined the design with simple back stitch, and then just filled in the gap with satin stitch.  The bikini straps are double stitches.

On, I should mention something about the zip too… again because of the sports fabric being a little stretchy and we all know what inserting a zip into stretchy fabric looks like ie. absolutely blooming’ awful most of the time…. anyway I interfaced the zip opening with fusible interfacing AND stay-stitched the zip box as well as the stitching lines before putting in the zip.  I think it did the trick as my zip is nice and smooth and flat with no bubbly bits or humps or bumps.

Et voila!