The Minifacto Bag

Christine of ChrisW Designs created not one but 2 bags for the June Bag of the Month Club this year. The Factorium (which I did not make) is a large bag suitable for light travel or for the office to carry papers, laptop or other electronic devices and more. This Minifacto Bag is the smaller bonus bag included in the BOMC and it is a cross body bag for daily use. It can fit inside the larger Factorium bag. I chose to test this smaller Minifacto bag. Some of the testers made both or chose the larger or smaller bag to test only. As always, Christine's instructions are excellent! (*Note you can only get this bag pattern through the Bag of the Month Club now. It will be available for sale by Christine on her website in 6 months, so not until December 2017. If you join the BOMC now, you will get all 6 patterns that came out from January 2017-June 2017, plus this Minifacto BONUS pattern. A new BOMC will start in July for 6 months with 6 new patterns from 6 designers).

To see both the large Factorium and Minifacto bags made by the testers you can go here.

I made a few changes to the bag and noted in the caption what those changes I made were. This is a really nice bag to carry just a few belongings with you. It has a lot of pockets, especially Christine's signature cell phone pocket, which is so handy because you can access your phone (or in my case keys) quickly without having to even open up the bag itself. The bag is not too big or too small.

The strap has an adjustable slide, so it can be adjusted to fit the person wearing it for across the body or on the shoulder. I did not have the type of closure that Christine called for in the pattern to close the front pocket, so I sewed on a large snap. (You can see this pocket open several pictures below).

Zipper opening to the bag. You can see the front pocket is pleated, giving it a bit more space in the pocket.

The strap tabs on the pattern are shorter and are sewn into the top seam, but I wanted my strap tabs to show more, so I made them longer and added a bit of bling to enhance them too. 

See the cell phone pocket and how easy it is to access your cell phone and or keys.

The bag of the bag has a hidden zippered pocket, which you cannot see in this photo.

See the zippered pocket here?

Here the hidden zippered pocket is opened and I put a tin inside so you can see in better. 

Here is the front pocket opened up. See where I sewed a large snap to keep the pocket closed. I did not have the pocket closure called for in the pattern, so I used a snap instead and it works great.

To give you an idea of what can fit inside, I put my wallet, reading glasses and sunglasses, a pen in the slip pocket too.

Inside is a zippered pocket and across from it a slip pocket. Another change I made was to make a sleeve (out of the green exterior fabric) for a stiff corrugated plastic to help make the bottom more rigid. In the pattern, Christine called for a thinner template plastic that is sewed in place before turning the bag right-side-out. I just didn't want to wrestle with the bag doing that, so I made this small change.

Here you can see the slip pocket closer. I like to divide my slip pockets with a pen size division, so you have a place to put a pen or pencil and a slip pocket on each side of the pen pocket division.

 This bag was donated to an auction to raise funds for Alzheimer's Disease 2022.

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