Weekender Bag Sew Along - The Grand Finale!

Although I couldn't wait to just move along to the next side and get this thing DONE, one thing held me back:

See how the side pockets aren't even?  The strawberry is higher than the tulip, and although I tried talking myself into not caring, I care. 

So I ripped it out.  This was after I had already sewed it on with no less than 3 passes.  I fudged it a bit, and made the pockets match a little better before sewing it back together again:

I also broke my nail in the process :-(:

Then Pookie helped me mock up my 2nd side:

And I got that bad boy sewn on to get a finished Weekender exterior:

 

Unfortunately, my strawberry looks more like a tomato now, but whatevs :-/

So on to the sewing the lining together!  I did this much the same way I did the exterior:

I totally ignored the weird and fiddly-looking instructions about making a pocket for the stabilizer to put in the bottom of the bag...I couldn't picture it, and I was honestly too tired to figure it out.   Instead, I figured I could just do a false bottom.  So I just sewed the lining together, dropped it into the bag exterior, and then hand-stitched it around the zipper tape.  This was labor-intensive, and my fingers were sore from pushing through the layers of thick fabric/tape, but it fit together perfectly:

Then I made a false bottom by taking some cardboard and mocking up about how big I needed to make the bottom:

Then I used that template to cut out foam board (yes, the kind the kiddos use for presentations!  I got a big piece for a buck at the dollar store) and 2 pieces of lining fabric, which I cut about 1/2" larger than the board all around.  I ironed fusible fleece to the lining fabric for some extra padding:

I sewed the lining fabric pieces wrong sides together on 3 sides, leaving one short side open.  I flipped the whole thing inside-out so the right sides were now facing out, popped the piece of foam board in, folded the open edges down, and sewed them together.  My bottom ended up a smidge larger than my cardboard template, but it worked out just fine:

Voila!  A snug false bottom that isn't shifting anywhere, and which gives my bag a nice firm base:

And a shot of the interior, all sewn in:

I added some ribbons to the zipper pulls, and TA-DA!  My Weekender is finished!

 

And, I finished it in time for my trip to Playa Del Carmen!  I even made a little matching zipper bag out of the scraps:

I can't tell you how proud I am to have conquered this bag.  There are plenty of things I will do differently when I make another (oh yeah, there will be another!), and I'll summarize all that stuff in a future post.  Until then, I'm just going to bask in the glow of accomplishment! :-)