Personalize your cell phone sleeping bag, the cut-and-sew project available at Spoonflower (Cell Phone Sleeping Bag Cut-and-Sew Project), by adding your name with embroidery. You can use an electronic embroidery machine, of course, and you can also embroider a name by hand. If you’re giving the bag as a gift, a hand-embroidered name gives your gift a detail that’s extra special.

Follow the instructions in this post to add a hand embroidered name to the cell phone bag.

Materials

• Cut-and-Sew Cell Phone Sleeping Bag (Available to order from Spoonflower)
• Fabric marking pencil or dark colored erasable fabric marker
• Embroidery hoop, about 5” in diameter
• Embroidery floss
• Embroidery needle, size 6 to 8

Instructions

In most cases, you’ll want to add the embroidery before cutting the project pieces out of the fabric to help ensure that there will be enough fabric to fit well in your embroidery hoop.

If necessary, iron the fabric to remove any wrinkles. To protect the fabric, iron on the reverse side or put a cloth between the iron and the project fabric to protect it.

Decide on where you’ll position the name and how large you’d like it to be. Keep in mind that part of the width of the project piece is taken up by the seam allowance, and some more of the width will wrap around the edge of the phone when the phone is placed inside.

You could write the name on the bag freehand, if you’d like. For more control, I created a version on paper for tracking. I first wrote the name on a piece of paper, then scanned it into a word processing document where I resized it.

Trace the name onto the project fabric using a fabric pencil or disappearing fabric marker. A light-colored fabric pencil would be especially useful, but I used a dark purple air-erasing fabric marker and it worked just fine. To help see the pattern through the fabric, it can be helpful to use a light board or tape the pattern and the fabric to a sunlit window.

Embroider the pattern using the backstitch (How to embroider the backstitch). For this bag I used two strands of white embroidery floss.

When the embroidery is finished, cut out the project pieces. Make sure to preserve the part of the fabric that has the sewing instructions for the bag.

Press the fabric to remove any wrinkles, being careful not to smash your embroidery stitches.

Lovely! Now your ready to sew the bag using the instructions printed on the fabric.

Order your cut and sew cell phone bag on Spoonflower and choose a fat quarter of fabric: Cell Phone Sleeping Bag

If you’d like to make several of these bags or would like to use this project for a sewing class, the project fabric is available by the yard by special order. Contact me at maria.bywater{at}sewjewish.com.