Sewing with Clear (and Jelly) Vinyl (Friday Foto Fun #291)

Happy Friday!  I love a good little zipper pouch or boxed zipper pouch!  Lately, I've seen a trend in the custom fabric groups selling more clear vinyl and jelly vinyl aka translucent-colored vinyl.  I just had to try it out and I made this super cute boxed pouch!

Well, to be fair this was NOT the first pouch I made that day with clear vinyl.  I started with a normal Zippy Pouch that had two sides and a zipper on top with a gusset.

Some key tips that I learned with sewing with clear vinyl:

• Check your machine tension, you can really see if these are off!
• Use a teflon or non-stick foot on your machine.  Clear vinyl is rather sticky.
• Use a hair dryer to soften the vinyl in order to turn the pouch.
• Pouches are SUPER fast when you don't need to worry about a lining. I could make these so quickly!

Once I got finished with the normal zippy pouch, I thought I should try a boxed pouch.  The difference with the boxed pouch is that the vinyl is one piece rather than 2 and you have a few more seams to sew to make it boxy.

Easy peasy and again like the normal zippy, super fast to sew together.  The next bag I wanted to make was the top photo with having a boxed bag with a jelly bottom, so really 3 pieces of vinyl, 2 clear and 1 jelly.  This was also not difficult but the boxed sides got a little tricky with the thickness of all the vinyl seams at the transition.  I recommend using a hump jumper to make sure that you don't skip stitches.  Remember when sewing through vinyl, you are punching holes so mistakes are really difficult to fix!  Backstitching doesn't always make the seam stronger either since you are perforating the vinyl more with the extra stitching!

What are your weekend sewing plans?  Tomorrow, I'll be sewing more bags on my stream starting at 9am central on my Twitch channel.  I hope to see you there!

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