How NOT to Make a Lined Zippered Bag

I want to make a padded carrying case for my very small tablet.  I never made a zippered bag before, so as I lay awake last night, I kept going back and forth in my mind over the various ways I might accomplish it.  I was worried because I want it lined - I don't like those raw edges on the inside of unlined things.  I even considered making something without a zipper, with just a Velcro or button closure.  But that didn't seem like it would keep little scratchy things from getting inside the bag.

So when I got up this morning, I looked for online tutorials, found tons of them (what was I worried about?) and settled on a good one.  These are the raw materials I picked to coordinate with my new grey leather tote bag.

Because I wanted the bag padded, I added batting.  This is the outside with one kind of quilting - diagonal lines in grey thread.

 This is the other side with horizontal lines of pink and green thread.

All the tutorials I read said to use a zipper much larger than your bag.  But I really liked this green zipper and it was just barely long enough.  I could have put the zipper on the short side of the rectangle, but the print is directional and I cut it out so the orientation was horizontal.  If I put the zipper on the short end. I'd have my birds turned 90 degrees. 

Why didn't I think about that before all the quilting?  Who knows.  But at this point in the process, I convinced myself that if I was very careful, I could squeak by.  From the photograph, it looks feasible, don't you think?

And right here I should have remembered my number one rule: shortcuts wind up taking you longer.  Like when you try to move a piece of furniture that has stuff on it, and you tell yourself if you're really careful nothing will fall off.  So you're really careful, and things fall off and break anyway. Lesson being, I should have cut out new fabric, put the zipper on the narrow end of the rectangle, and put the tablet in vertically.

But I didn't.  I wasn't being obdurate.  I was being naive and confident and forgetful of the shortcut rule.  Remember the part about me being awake during the night?

And I also didn't refer to the directions after I read them online, even after I spent a lot of time formatting them so they would fit on fewer pages.  I figured I spent so much time reading them that I had them memorized.  I printed them out, and kept moving them out of the way on my sewing table.

I was proud of myself for remembering this tip I read about the zipper tab:  If you don't want a wiggle in your seam when you sew around it, here's what you do:  Unzip it to about halfway down your edge.  Sew up to it and stop.

Take your project out of your machine, zip the zipper up so the tab is out of the say, and continue with the seam.  I made a beautiful straight seam and was very proud.

After I sewed the second side, this is what I had.  OOPS.  I'm supposed to have my outer fabric on the left AND the right sides of the zipper.  I have my lining fabric on the right.  I quickly shifted my evaluation to "I kind of like it like that."  And I kind of did, even if one side of the outside wasn't going to have quilting on it.

The good news is, I was able to make the zipper fit.  The bad news was I couldn't do my topstitching next to the zipper because that tab was in the way.  If I had a nice long zipper like I was supposed to, it wouldn't have been in the way.

I finished the rest of the sewing and turned it inside out.  But doggone it - that opening is supposed to be on the lining, not on the outside of the bag.  And you can see from the zipper that this is the only way the zipper will work, so this is definitely my outside.  

So this is what you get when you screw up and accidentally put the lining on the outside of one side of the bag.  And no amount of "I kind of like it like this." will fix it.  

I could have just slip-stitched it shut, and I would have except for one HUGE problem.  My tablet doesn't fit.  You know that episode of Friends where Ross, Chandler, and Rachel are trying to get his new sofa up the stairs and he keeps shouting "PIVOT!"?  Well, no amount of pivoting could get the tablet into the bag.

So another day (not today - blech) I need to start all over, and try it with the zipper on the skinny end.   I'll cut out new fabric so the birds are oriented correctly.  I'll go slow, follow directions very closely, and not to try to talk myself into something if a little voice thinks there might be a problem.