They should put you in a padded room

The next in my line of sewing experiments was to make a padded bag for Willie's Netbook. (For the uninitiated, Netbooks are little tiny laptop computers, usually around 7-inches by 9-inches.) Willie wanted a bag for it, but it drowned in normal sized laptop bags and I've been looking for another excuse to make bags.

I decided that padding would be nice, but for a computer, I really wanted a little more protection against pointed or corner pressure that might damage the screen. I decided to pad the bag with high density foam from the craft store and plexiglass to make the sides of the bag rigid.

One thing I have learned in all my experiments is that you have to work from the inside out. If you want inner pockets, you need to put them on first. This can be a challenge if you're not following a pattern and just making it up as you go along. I did line the one big pocket for the front, the flap, and added a tiny pocket inside that pocket for a USB drive.

Putting the lining around the padding was a major challenge. In hindsight, I should have made pockets in two layers of lining and sewn the padding between them. But, I didn't come up with that until I was half-way through attaching the padding directly to the exterior of the bag. Another thing I learned was that sewing around the bag on the front of the bag effectively increased the size of the front panel of the bag. I didn't realize that until I went to line up the sides at the very end and discovered that when the tops lined up, the bottom padding wasn't on the bottom.

The handles involved another lesson for me: when there's a piece of rigid plastic in the bag, it won't fit between the sewing machine foot and the sewing machine itself. The approach I used on the handles to my purse has worked out quite well, so I thought I'd do that again. But because I couldn't rotate the bag under the sewing foot, I ended up just double stitching the top and bottom instead.

Since the Netbook is quite slim, I decided on really simple sides. Once again the extra fabric from my half-ass lining made a clean seam difficult. But hey, the extra fabric is just extra padding, right? I was disappointed with how the padding and lining turned out, but the handles and especially the pockets turned out quite well. We'll see how they hold up in real life.

Inspired by my marginal success in a padded bag, I'm hoping to take a step back towards easy and make a more summer-colored purse next. It's only a small step back since I want to add a zipper on the top, but in a different way that the small pouches I've made with zippers. So many things I want to sew, so little time!