Quilted ruffle sun glass case tutorial!

I introduced this cute quilted ruffle sun glass case a couple of weeks ago. A few of you said you'd like a tutorial and so I finally stopped being lazy and put it together for you. Yay!

It's quick project to make, totally doable in one nap time. Assuming your kid is a nice two-hour-long napper like mine. And I think it'd be perfect for an end-of-year teacher gift. N'est pa?

Here's what you need:

4 rectangles of quilting cotton or home dec-weight fabric measuring about 8 inches by 4 inches. Two from your outer fabric and two of the inside fabric. 

2 pieces of batting 8 inches by 4 inches.

 2 rectangles of the outer fabric for your flap that measure about 8 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches. 

1 strip for the ruffle in the lining fabric measuring about 16 inches by 3 1/2 inches.

For your binding, 1 strip from your outer fabric 8 inches long by 2 inches wide. Or you can use store-bought bias tape. 

Optional: Either store-bought bias tape or made from your lining fabric, 20 inches, for the interior seam.

A snap for closing. And in my case, a glue gun. 

All the sewing essentials: thread, sewing machine, glass of wine.

Please note: when I made this case, I made it way too big. So the fabric rectangles you see below should look larger than the ones you're cutting. Really, you can size this up or down depending on the size of your sunglasses. As you can see, mine are large. This should fit those Jackie-O style glasses with ease.

1. Make your ruffle.

Take the long strip of fabric for your ruffle. Set your machine to its longest stitch length. Mine is a 5. With a 1/4 inch seam, sew down each long side of the fabric without back stitching at the beginning or end. Be sure to leave long tails of thread at each end. You're going to pull these to create your ruffle.

Now with each side stitched, find the thread on each corner that when pulled causes your fabric to gather. Gently tug that thread while pushing the fabric together. Make sure to pull evenly from each corner. Keep gathering the fabric until you have an 8-inch long strip.

2. Pin the ruffle with wrong-sides together to one of your flap pieces. Sew together, following your basting stitch line. NOTE: I didn't finish the ends of my ruffle. Before attaching to flap, you can finish your edges by serging the ends or doing a zig-zag stitch along each long end.

3. Pin the two pieces of fabric for your flap with right-sides together. Sew around both long sides and one short side with a 1/4 seam.

To get a nice, sharp corner, be sure to stop sewing with your needle down and lift your presser foot, then turn the fabric 90 degrees. Put your presser foot back down and keep sewing!

Once you're done, trim down a bit and snip the corners down almost to your sewing line.

Turn inside out through the open end. Your ruffly flap is all done!

4. Now, onto the main body of the case. Make a sandwich for each side of the case like this: lining fabric right-side down, then the piece of batting, then your outer fabric right-side up. Pin together well. Now quilt each sandwich. I quilted mine using a straight-stitch, eyeballing it as I went. I believe they were about 1/2 inch apart. And I went up and down the long way.

Keep on quilting! 

5. When you've finished quilting, square up your pieces. Trim any uneven spots and make sure the two pieces are the same size.

Here are mine after I've matched them up and trimmed a bit away, all the way around.

6. Now pin with right-sides together. Your lining sides should be facing out. Sew around the case starting at the top of one long side, going around one short side and back up the other long side. Leave one short side open. 

When you turn it inside out, it should look like this.

7. I don't have a photo of this step. Sorry! I actually went back and added this later. You can leave your inside seams unfinished. But I wanted them to look a bit more polished so I added double-fold bias tape. Simple sandwich the seam inside the bias tape and then sew around. Since this won't be visible from the outside, I wouldn't worry about hand-stitching this binding on.

8. OK, now to make the binding! Take the small rectangle you cut for your binding.

Iron it in half lengthwise.

And then open up and iron each side in toward the middle. Like this.

This is your homemade double-fold bias tape.


9. Pin the flap into place with the ruffly-top sandwiched between the flap and the case. Like so.

Now open your bias tape and pin it around the outside with the wrong-side up and the top edge of all layers aligned. 

You want to machine stitch this together just inside of the right-most crease in the above picture.  The first crease in from the edge where all your layers meet. Go slowly and try to stay just inside that line as you sew all the layers together.

10. Now the last step!

The first time around, I did thinks the quick way. I fold my bias tape over and pinned it along the inside of my case . Then I machine stitched it together. Like so:

You can certainly do that. But I really hated the way it looked. So when I wound up resizing my entire case -- by chopping off the top and starting over with a new binding -- I decided to do the last step by hand. It's so much easier to get a nice looking binding that way. I recommend it. 

And then you're done!

Oh wait. What's that? A snap? Ah yes. I forgot to add a snap to my case until it was all put together. So at the last moment, I used my glue gun and glued one into place. And you know what? It works just fine. If you want to sew yours in, you need to do that before you sew your two sides of the flap together and before you sew the two sides of the quilted case together. But you have my permission to be lazy and just glue that bad boy on there.

And if you have a cute flower pin sitting around, begging to be the finishing touch on some project, certainly add it, as I did! 

Hope you enjoyed this! Please, if you have questions, let me hear them. And if you make one for yourself, I'd love to see a photo of it! Drop me an email at tharshesews @ gmail.com or leave a comment with  a link to your blog.

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