I Spy Bag Tutorial

This is a project that was a long time in the making.  An I spy bag can be really boring or endlessly entertaining.  I spent a long time gathering small little trinkets that would fit inside and be fun to find for a toddler.  Although, I really liked how they came out, if I make them again I'll use small glass beads instead of rice.  The rice broke down a little bit after extended use and left a bit of a film on the plastic.  Other than that they turned out really fun.  You could do so many fun things with this, or fun themes.  You could do something for each letter of the alphabet, or a jungle theme, or fashion, the possibilities are endless!  Here is what I came up with:

The finished product

The hardest and most fun part is finding all of the fun things to go inside.  Get creative!  You could use game pieces or puzzle pieces that are from incomplete ones, Barbie or polly pocket accessories(lone shoes, etc), marbles, keys, cool buttons, paper clips, rocks, confetti, small plastic animals or dolls, etc, etc.

In this picture I had already sewn the plastic on, but I wanted to show the general size and shape you want.  I used an orange fleece I had leftover from another project and some clear vinyl.  I cut them both in a large rectangle, twice as long as what I wanted for the final bag(if you want to you can just use the vinyl in the windows, but I wanted mine to be heavy duty).  I wanted mine to be about 7 inches by 7 inches, so I just cut it about 7 inches tall and almost 15 inches wide.  I wanted the windows to be pretty big, so I cut them almost 4 inches, making sure that the two windows met when I folded the material in half.  A rotary blade and plaque come in really handy to make sure all of your lines are straight, but you can do it without them, too.

Next I pinned the vinyl and fleece together, pinning all around the window, but also a couple at the top, just to make sure everything kept straight.  I sewed pretty close to the edge of the window.  After sewing around both windows I folded the bag in half, matched up the edges, pinned it all together and sewed around the edges, starting with one of the top side corners and leaving about 3 inches unsewn so that I could put the rice and fun stuff in.  

I put all the trinkets in first and then added the rice afterward.  You won't want to fill it really full because it will make it hard to move the beads(or rice) and other items around and it will be harder to sew closed.  Once you have it just right, pin the rest and finish sewing it shut.

Have fun and get creative!