{Beach Bag Tutorial}

Hi friends! I have a super fun summer project to share with you today! With summer approaching quickly I knew we needed a beach bag, but I'm super cheap and can't find one I like to fit my tiny budget so...diy time! 

I wanted to make a bag out of a towel so I did a little Googling and what do you know, our good friend Martha Stewart had a great towel beach bag! However, I found the directions majorly lacked details so if you are a visual person like me I hope you'll appreciate a few more pictures, descriptions and easy tweeks! Here we go!

Supplies:

1 bath towel

1 hand towel in the same color {Target $3.49 for a 2-pack...at the bottom of this post I'll show you what I made with the extra towel!}

webbing, twill, tape, ribbon, or fabric to make your handles, each cut to 25"

2 buttons (optional)

basic sewing supplies

I chose to make my own handles out of fabric as opposed to using webbing, but you can do whatever you want! Just make sure you have 2 25" lengths of whatever you chose to use.

 Pin your handles to the long side of your hand-towel 7.5 inches in from each side. You are also pinning them 3" down from the top. Make sure not to twist the handle. It should look like a "U".  Also make sure you pin the handle to the "right side" of the towel. I left the tags on the towels so it would be easy for me to tell which side was which. 

Stitch each side of the handle down in a rectangle to reinforce the straps and make sure they are nice and strong. It will look like this...

 Now you are going to lay your hand towel on top of the short side of your bath towel and mark where you need to put the other handle. Martha's directions tell you to get a hand towel that is the same width as your bath towel. Mine was like an inch and a half shorter, but I made it work. Center your hand towel onto your bath towel (if they aren't the same length) and pin as a marker where you need your other handle to go.

 All pinned and ready to stitch down the same way you stitched the other handle. In a rectangle to reinforce the straps.

 Ok, now the straps are attached so lay them right sides together matching the handles and the top edges. See how my hand towel is a little shorter? Irritating, but it really doesn't matter too much. If I was super fancy and had a serger, I would have trimmed the bath towel to the length of the hand towel and serged the raw edge, but I'm not fancy.

 Once everything is lined up, pin the bottom edge of the hand towel to the bath towel.

 Stitch down with a 3/8" allowance. *Note: I used my walking foot because terry cloth is cushy. Worked well, but if you don't have a walking foot, just use lots of pins and go slow.

 Now you are going to pin the sides and stitch them down also using a 3/8 allowance.

All stitched!!! This is how you lay on it at the beach. You can put your cover up or something in the pocket as a pillow. Awesome but here is the fun part...flip the bag part inside out...

 See how the towel is hanging out? Roll it up and tuck it inside. It will look like this...

 Love it! Except for those little flappies that the excess bath towel made, but never fear...buttons to the rescue!

I just hand sewed a button to each flap and it's holding it down and out of the way just fine. 

Want to see what I made with the extra towel???

A fun little pouch to hold my wallet, phone, sunscreen and anything else on the small side that I don't want floating around in the big bag!

I hope this tutorial makes sense! It's really not hard at all and you end up with a really good sized bag to take with you to the beach! I can't wait for summer!!!

Check out Martha's bag which was my inspiration and guidelines for this bag.

Martha's Beach-Towel Tote Bag