Drawstring Bag

I finished the Drawstring Bag I made from the Make it With Me Sew Along at Sweet Bee Buzzings. Bethany's directions were excellent. The bag is simple, and good looking.

 I used a colorful fabric that I had bought over 10 years ago!. I only bought a half of yard of it and it was just the perfect amount to make this bag, including using a piece of it for the lining of the interior zippered pocket.  This bag could be made using one fabric for the main body of the bag or you could make it patchwork by cutting squares and sewing the squares together. I opted to use this fabric since it has a patchwork feel to it, yet I didn't have the extra work of making the patchwork first.

This is the other side of the bag.

Inside the bag there is both a zippered pocket and a slip-in patch pocket.

I used the exterior fabric for the lining of the zippered pocket. 

This is the other interior pocket that is divided into two sections.

I chose to use an accent fabric in the teal color for both the handles and the drawstring, plus the inside pocket too. I had just enough of the teal fabric to make those parts too.

The only thing I had an issue with making this bag was with the grommets. I have made several shower curtains in the past and used the grommet plier-like tool, which works great. However, I bought some Drtiz brand grommets a while back when my husband needed something with grommets. These were weird-looking grommets with teeth on the one part. I studied it for a long time and could not figure out why there was teeth and how the metal would attach to the fabric. I ended up in tears and my husband came to my rescue. I didn't have the strength to pound the metal part down flat enough with the hammer. Hubby pounded all the grommets in place. Then as I finished making the rest of the bag and was going to sew the 1/4-inch top-stitching around the top of the bag, I felt 2 of the grommets were loose. I tried gluing them on to stay in place. Then I could feel the back of one of the grommets had come completely off and was inside the bag!

The grommets I had used in the past were essentially eyelets. These grommets with the teeth are just awful in my opinion! They don't make sense. If you look at the photos in Bethany's sew-along, that's the kind I have always used with the plier tool and they work beautifully and are easy to insert and stay put. So I will never use grommets again that have those teeth on them!

This is a photo of the grommet with the teeth. What are those teeth for? They hold on to the fabric, but when they get pounded with the hammer, don't they just flatten against the upper ring? What holds the fabric in place? The protruding part of the ring shown on the top just gets flattened too as the other side of the teeth doesn't have an indentation to hold that part to the lower ring. Whereas on an eyelet, the long part curls around the bottom ring into the indentation. This upper part doesn't do that because there is no indentation and it doesn't flatten in the same way. Is it just me or has anyone else had issues with these grommets too?

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