Dice Bags Tutorial

My wonderful counterpart decided to purchase an obscene amount of dice for his D&D group.  Well, once he ordered this huge box worth of dice, he wanted somewhere to store them (for him and his friends).  Since I was looking for something to do with Nina, I hopped on the opportunity for a New Year's project!

Pinterest wasn't really help with finding tutorials for drawstring bags for dice.  After some Googling, I found several good tutorials, which this one won as a guide, but I used grommets instead of the sewn seam with ribbon.  Considering how often these bags would be tugged on, etc., I wanted to make sure the drawstring part was sturdy.

I love that I didn't need to buy fabric for this since I had a dice pattern one from another project... although I ended up buying some grommets and thin faux leather string.

The blue fabric is actually a thicker fabric than the cotton dice one.

I cut 12"x5" strips for the bags then stitched the dice material right side together first.  Then I cut a 2.5"x2.5" square of batting to make the next step easier. I wanted to embroider each person's initials on the bag and even practiced it a couple times before doing it.  Considering I've never really done it before, I'm rather proud.

As usual, Domino isn't impressed with my embroidery work.  The L is the best, which doesn't surprise me at all.

Notice that I embroidered the letters first BEFORE I stitched the right sides together? Made life easier. After embroidering, I pulled the stitches through the back then stitched the fabric right sides together like I did for the dice fabric earlier.  After turning it inside out I then slipped the dice fabric inside, turned the tops down and pinned them together so I could stitch the seams together at the top.

Love how the stitching at the top ended up looking. 

See? Nice little bags.

Then came the grommets... again, a new thing for me.  We went to Michaels to buy them, but they're called eyelets there... not grommets.

And the "gun" or eyelet punch was crap. Paid $20 for a piece of equipment that didn't work properly (kept sticking and ripping larger than needed holes in the fabric).  We wasted 10-15 eyelets because the stupid clamp punch thing didn't close correctly and broke the eyelets. I had the boy do it since it required strength and it wasn't working right. He ended up gluing some of the eyelets in place so the bags wouldn't rip futher, etc. 

See the two different ways he did the eyelets? I liked the six spaced evenly so he continued with that. 

This is one of the best laying ones. 

Scrunched up nicely!

He glued caps that looked like locks on the ends. Looks good! 

Thoughts? I think we did a pretty good job! And as soon as I finished this I realized I didn't make him one (D'oh!) so I had to make his on another night.

I'm surprised at how easy the J was.

He wanted his to look different so I went with a brown and black speckles fabric I had. Looks nice with the orange!