Shower Caddy

I made this shower caddy for my daughter, Lindsey, for Christmas.

It is made with laminated cotton fabric. I ordered this fabric from lu summers on etsy. I love the fabric and at the time I ordered it months ago, I wasn’t in a rush, so I didn’t mind ordering it to be sent from England and paying the postage. Laminated fabric is fairly heavy and this added to the postage fees. I was going to make this pattern by Terry Atkinson which I blogged about here –

However, there are so many pieces with fussing and cutting, zippers and binding that I decided this was not the pattern to use laminated fabric for. I did an online search for “shower organizer sewing tutorials” and came up with this:

This pattern is a free tutorial by Alida Rad who blogs about DYI projects at http://www.Radcrafter.com. She has many other fun tutorials for all sorts of things on her site. Her organizer finished is about 9″ long, 6 inches wide and 7 1/2″ inches tall. I used her pattern pieces but I cut 2″ off of the height. This pattern has only a few pattern pieces – 2 sides, bottom and handles. I added the pockets to the inside by simply cutting an 8″ wide strip which I folded in half lengthwise to create 4″ deep pockets (less seam allowance) on the inside.

I had to do some research on sewing with laminated fabrics. If you use pins, they leave holes so you have to either use them in the seam allowance where the holes won’t show or use something else like binder clips or paperclips to hold pieces together. Another problem is that the laminated side of the fabric wants to stick to the presser foot and to the throat plate. I happen to have a teflon presser foot but I found that using my walking foot worked better. I used painters tape on the throat plate to keep the fabric from sticking there.

I added the pocket pieces to the sides with small pleats in the bottom to create room to insert things like makeup brushes or hair brushes.

The outside of the bag is sewn together in the same way except that there are no pockets involved.

If I followed the traditional directions for this bag, I would sew the handles onto the sides and then place the lining and outer bag together right sides together and sew around the top. I would have to have an opening somewhere in order to turn it right side out. I did not want to do this.

The laminated fabric will not fray and at this point in my sewing shown above, with the lining looking taller than the outer bag, it seemed to be a brilliant idea to just fold the lining over the top and sew it in place. I had to decide what to do about the handles.  I thought I might just add them under the “binding” as I had in the original caddy.

However, this makes the handles somewhat awkward to use. I decided to simply make a “slit” at the top where each handle would fit.

Before I sewed the handles in and topstitched around the top edge, I decided to stiffen the sides and bottom with pel-tex. I cut pieces to size for the bottom and all 4 sides and inserted them in between the lining and the outer bag. The Pet-tex that I used was fusible so I did try to fuse the sides together by touching a hot iron to them with a press cloth in place. I’m not sure this fusing will hold indefinitely but I figured if it held it in place while I sewed the top edge, that would be enough to keep the inside pieces in place.

The finished bag is a great size, about 9″ x 6″ x 5 1/2″.  It has inside pockets on all 4 sides and can be easily wiped off, inside and out if it get’s wet or dirty. How great is that? I can’t wait to try another project with laminated fabric.