How to Make a Fandom Dice Bag

Dice rock. In fact, they rock so much, that Nathan and I made them the favors at our wedding.

Photo by E.P. Photography

Recently a group of our friends has been having fun with a Star Wars role-playing game put out by Nathan's company, Fantasy Flight Games. It has its own set of dice that we wanted to keep separate from our regular gaming dice. So I decided to make everyone their own special Star Wars dice bag. Originally it was going to be a draw string leather bag, but that sort of morphed and zippers are better for keeping dice in anyhow.

First off, you need to cut a piece of fabric that is four times the size as you would like to make your finished bag, plus seam allowances. This can be either a rectangle as shown above or a square as pictured below.

I made most of the bags from quilting cotton, but you can use any non-stretchy fabric that you feel comfortable working with.

You next need to turn your fabric into a doubled over rectangle. For the blue square, all I had to do was fold it over. For the white fabric, I had to fold it, sew one of the long edges right side together, then turn it back right side out. Either way, you need one folded or finished doubled edge facing up.

Then you get to fold it over again and find a zipper that fits the upper edge. I had two short zippers salvaged from other projects that worked well here. The blue one is an invisible zipper, which I don't recommend for this project but was all that I had.

Now you are going to cut that folded side seam, so that for each side you have a doubled over square with the finished side pointing up.

Time to attach your badge! I made mine on my embroidery machine, using this Jedi Order design from etsy, but you can just purchase and stitch on a badge of your own fandom choosing. If you have an embroidery machine, you could of course embroider your design right on the bag, but I thought the pleather looked cool.

Because pleather shows pinholes, I glued down the circles before sewing them, rather than pinning them on.

Time to put the zipper in! This is a good project to learn about putting in zippers, as all  you have to do is pin down the finished edges on the zipper and sew!

Make sure to leave a half inch on each end unsewn, this will allow you to sew the side seams. See how the pins mark the gap above.

Time to sew down the edges! I start at the top of each side and sew down to the bottom. After doing both sides, I sew straight across the bottom. You may need a zipper foot to get close into the top, as the zipper will want to push the foot away from itself up there. MAKE SURE YOUR ZIPPER IS UN-ZIPPED BEFORE YOU COMPLETE THIS STEP! Zippers can be hard to unzip from the interior.

I did finish all the edges with my serger, but this is not a necessary step.

Turn it right side out. The ends of the zipper may want to pop out at the side, so you may want to turn and tack them down, as seen by the red arrow.

A little pressing with the iron and you're done!

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