Free peg bag pattern

I'm feeling in a generous mood.  So generous that I've digitised my peg bag pattern for you, for free.  You're welcome!

Download the pattern here.  (It's a pdf file.)

The pattern pages should be printed on 6 sheets of A4 paper.  (I'm from England, that's how we roll.)  Remember to set "scaling 100%" or "none"  or whatever when you print, as usual when you have print-at-home sewing patterns.  There are red stars everywhere which should align beautifully when you tape it together properly: there are red letters to help you match pages properly.  You should find yourself taping it into a 3 x 2page block which contains three pattern pieces, the largest of which is about 43cm from top to bottom.

Cut around the solid lines.  I have included lightly dotted lines to show the stitching lines: the seam allowance is 1/4" on the outside edges and the opening edges are left raw for you to finish with bias binding.  I recommend 3/4" binding which you can make yourself.

I'm not generous enough to provide instructions, but I'm sure you can work it out.  I will pass on a few options though:

1.  Use just one fabric layer, or a quilted sandwich as I did.  Finish the dart edges and all raw inside edges with bias binding (not just the opening).

2.  Be a bit clever with separate outside and lining pieces, and sew them up such that all the raw edges are hidden in-between the layers after you construct it.  The final construction will be a bit mind-bending, especially around the opening.  I imagine you'll end up turning it inside out through one or both of the opening edges, then binding the opening edges last.  I've not quite thought it through, but it's probably possible to accomplish with minimum hand-sewing somehow.

For more details of how I made my version, clicky here.  I provide handy methods of calculating bias binding here.

You might wonder why I'm bothering to provide a pattern with no instructions.  I can only be bothered to provide patterns for things that aren't obviously easy to draw yourself (with likely first time success).  This pattern has darts in the bottom to create fullness for a multitude of pegs, and the first pattern you might draw for a bag like this doesn't work unless you engage brain.

In case you are interested (probably not), I use a mixture of Inkscape and Scribus to digitise my patterns.  It's both free and powerful!

Peg Bag II: attack of the pegs

For once I've actually made something I'm pleased with!

I made another peg-bag as a gift for a family member.

This is the second peg-bag I've made, as I fortunately decided to do a trial run by making one for myself first.  It was not a resounding success (see here), partly due to the terrible shape, and partly due to my using bias binding which too narrow and wasn't cut on the bias (so let's just call it "binding").  To top it all, the lack of quilting made the fabric sag, and the oval holes for the hanger and peg entrance were a pain to bind and stretched out of shape in the process.  Further still, in the process of using it, I found the hanger kept dropping into the main bag when my toddler was playing with it.  I also want to fold it up to store it so that the pegs don't fall out.

I fixed my problems (well, only the peg-bag related ones).

To fix the terrible shape, I busted out some maths.  Because I have darts for fullness in the bottom but not in the top, my pattern has to be almost trapezoidal in shape (wider at the bottom) so that when I've sewn it up I end with vertical sides.

Overlapping front pieces.  You even get a close-up of my binding because I'm not so ashamed of it this time around.

To fix the stretched ugly openings, I re-drew the front of the bag in two overlapping pieces.  The main opening is now formed from the curved edges of the two pieces and is lots easier to bind.  I also bound the hanger opening in two halves before constructing the bag.

Bound hanger opening.

To fix the nasty binding, I chose a wider width of 3/4".  I made the binding myself and cut it actually on the bias this time.  I'd been previously put off doing this by thinking that cutting such a narrow strip from the central bias of a huge piece of fabric would give a lot of wastage (two huge triangles), but then I found out about this method of cutting continuous bias tape.  I have given some thought to it and provided formulae to work out the size of square you need to cut in order to make the right amount of bias tape of any width.  I didn't have a 3/4" bias maker, but the Scientific Seamstress provides a cardboard plan for one in 1/2" or 1" sizes.  I measured her cunning design and calculated how to make myself the 3/4" version which works a treat.

Bias binding maker!  Thanks, past Alice, for saving the card from your wedding invitations!

To fix the saggy fabric, I decided to quilt two layers together with a layer of quilt batting between them.  I then cut out my pattern shapes and bound the opening edges.  Next, I stitched the darts and placed the pieces right-sides together and sewed round the edges into a bag.  However, this leaves nasty raw edges on the inside to chafe against pegs.  Not to fear - I used bias binding to enclose the raw edges of the darts and seams: nice bound seams!

Because everything takes 2 seconds in my head, I decided to patchwork 2" half-square triangles on the front and back of the bag.  Obviously this takes considerably longer to execute than I'd imagined (duh), and a lot of fabric.  I used 7 fat quarters in total: 4 patchwork fabrics, 2 inside fabrics and 1 binding fabric.  I don't have an awful lot left over, excepting some scraps and a bit of binding.  Thanks so much to my kind friend who gave my the pack of 6 co-ordinating fat quarters for a birthday present!  I know they're being given away again in a different form, but I've had a lot of fun with them and spent a LOT of time agonizing over their construction, not to mention the time spent chopping them into 2" squares and sewing them back together again.  Put like that, patchwork seems quite pointless doesn't it?!

Elastic loops to hold hanger in.  Also starring bound seam and diagonal quilting.  Cleverly hidden by photography: internal ugly patchwork from blue scraps where I ran out of white fabric.  Ha!

To fix my annoying hanger-drop issue, I attached two elastic loops into the top seam as I was stitching my bag together.  This holds the hanger in place, but it's still removable for laundering the bag.

To fix my storage issues, I added a little loop made from bias binding to the outside bottom of the bag.  This means you can slip it over the hanger wire when you fold the bag in half and everything stays put.  Nice!

Bias loop.  It's the little things that stop you having to play 52-peg-pickup.

So, that's your lot.  I can't believe how much thought I put into making a peg bag that looks totally ordinary and is functional.  It turns out it's easier to make something ugly and rubbish.  I'll now go back to cursing the prototype peg bag that I have to live with.

What's (geometrically) wrong with my peg bag.

I should be cleaning the kitchen, but instead I bring you: what is wrong with my peg bag (geometry edition).

From this ugly photo of the ugly bag, I think part of the wrongness arises because the sides of the bag taper inwards towards the bottom.  I'm not talking about the round-bottom shaping, but the slightly sloping sides.  They're not sloping enough to be style, just enough to be looking like a mistake.  And that's because they are.

I put two darts in the bottom of the bag to give volume for pegs.  I failed to calculate that this would make the slides slope inwards and make the bottom of the bag narrower than the top (well, duh).  In the interests of making my pattern correct next time, I thought I'd calculate what I was supposed to do when I drew those darts on my pattern.

Towards the bottom of the bag, my pattern should look like the image above with darts of angle theta and side l, and dart points separated by a distance x.  The total width of this pattern piece is z.  I also marked distance d and delta, which come in handy later.

 

When I come to sew up the darts, the bag will appear to have a width w when viewed from above.  This is narrower than z marked on my pattern piece, because the darts have given the piece some three-dimensional shape.

When viewed in cross-section, lying on a flat surface, the middle of the fabric will rise above the surface by height h (at least, if it were made of stiff card, not floppy cotton).

The interesting quantities to me when I design the bag are theta and h.  The dart angle lets me choose how "boxy" I want the bag to be:  theta = 0 is no shaping at all, theta = 90 degrees is a square bottomed bag, and intermediate values give gentle shaping.  The quantity h allows me to choose how wide back-to-front my bag will be inside.

From my choice of theta and h, I can calculate some useful design parameters which help me to draw my darts in later.  Time to get out my calculator and calculate these numbers:

One can also find a few more useful numbers, in particular x and l which tell me the separation of my dart points, and how long the dart sides should be.

Finally, the total width of my pattern piece at the lower end should be z:

... while at the top by the hanger (where there are no darts), it should just be width w.  So, there we have my mistake, my friends: it's equal to z-w, if you cared.

I can now re-visit my wrong pattern with real numbers.  I'd just drawn darts in at random, but it looks like I used an angle of theta = 28 degrees, with a dart length of l = 4.5cm.  The top of my bag has width w = 34cm.  I find that tan(xi) = 0.601 (that's tan(squiggle), where "squiggle" is clearly the best greek letter), and  d = 3.86cm.  It means the inside of my bag has h = 3.1cm, but really it's 6.2cm across because I used darts in the back and front bag pieces.  Now for the interesting bit: the bottom of my flat pattern (near the darts) should have been z = 37cm across, not the 34cm that I used.  That's an 8% error: enough to make my bag look crap.

Time to re-draw!

I'm also going to change the mouth of the bag, add elastic loops inside to hold the hanger up, and a small fabric loop on the outside at the bottom to pass the hook through when you fold the bag in half for storage.

Sorry for the algebra explosion: if anyone thinks this sort of thing will actually be useful for them then drop me a comment and I could make a calculator-type thing, if maths isn't your forte...

Sunday sewing...

I've been meaning to make myself a peg bag for a while, to save myself having to carefully align the pegs in order to fit them into a stupid ice-cream carton.  No-one has time for that kind of nonsense (that is, peg alignment, not sewing).

My finished peg bag is above.  I'm not all that happy with it, to be honest.  The funky fabric is really the only redeeming feature of this bag.  However, in the interests of honesty, I'm sharing my sewing disasters.

I made the pattern, and although the pegs fill all the way up to the seam-line on the front, I still think the bag is a little too deep.  That seam-line on the front would also look better a tad lower.  The hanger is a wooden children's hanger, but one could just buy wooden adult hangers and saw the ends off.

The bias binding around the openings is too narrow, and not applied at all well (so no close-ups for you - ha!).  In this instance, it was laziness because I found this matching bias binding I'd made years ago, and I didn't want to make more.

In addition, although I used fusible interfacing on the lining for stiffness, I also used volume fleece as an interlining to give it more body.  It turns out that it wasn't such a good idea, and really the resultant bag would have been better interlined with a lightweight batting, with extra quilting on the front or inside.  My bag is much too flumpy and doesn't look neat and tidy as a result - the outside fabric floats uncomfortably over the multiple layers inside.  Oddly, this approach had worked really well on some previous bags I made (see here), but the distribution of weight is very different as they are top-opening, which I think is what saves the day.

The opening looks great on paper, but pulls oddly when the bag is filled.  Perhaps a circular hole would be better next time?

I was going to decorate the front with appliqué and buttons and grosgrain ribbon, but really who wants to throw good notions after bad?

Oh well, at least I get a functional peg-bag, and it's been a learning experience.  The next one will totally be heaps better.