Bag of the Week 43

Trick or Treat?

This past week has been Halloween central in my sewing studio.  Halloween is not a holiday I get into in a big way (no elaborate decorations, etc.) but I am enjoying making my kids’ costumes.  My oldest son is 4, just old enough to understand that Halloween means candy.  My youngest (2) just thinks the costumes are fun.  The great thing about kids this age is that two pieces of candy from six houses seems like a treasure trove. 

Last year my good friend Joyce brought my oldest a little fabric treat bag (she makes dozens of these each year, fills them with goodies and hands them out on Halloween night – lucky kids!)  We keep this bag on the top of the fridge with a few pieces of candy in it for special treats.  Since Son #2 needs his own treat bag this year I decided to make both boys new bags to use for our trick or treating on Sunday.  If you wait until right before Halloween you can get great deals on cotton Halloween fabric.   I used the same stripe for the lining of both bags and varied the outer fabric and trim.  I keep a roll of black webbing on hand and used that for the handles.

Come back on Sunday for a peak at the costumes I made.

Bag of the Week 42

Wash and Wear

Today’s post is actually last week’s bag.  I wrote about this project here, about the frustrations I was having.  Sigh.  I was so enjoying making this bag until I hit a snag.  It is now finished but so are some of the grand plans I had for this bag, too.

I fell in love with this little travel lingerie bag the first time I saw it in Stitch magazine (Spring 2010).  It is designed as a flat pouch with zippers at either end, divided in the middle to form two separate areas, one for clean items and one for dirty.  I used the template provided on the Stitch website and followed the author’s instructions for appliquéing the garments onto the light aqua linen I picked for the body of the bag.  The fabrics and laces are fused onto the bag before they are stitched down.  The instructions call for hand stitching with a running stitch but I used a small zigzag (1.5 mm x 1.5 mm) and monofilament thread.  The clothesline is pearl cotton couched on with more of the monofilament.  I chose to machine embroider the words instead of hand stitching them.  I found a great floss-stitched font at Jolson’s Designs (for a mere $3 – quite a bargain).  I even stitched a little monogram on the purple shirt.

I really enjoyed the project to this point.  When it came time to put the bag together I ran into trouble.  There is nothing wrong with the written instructions; I just couldn’t make my chosen supplies come together.  First, the linen I was using is fairly bulky.  I tried an old trick of using a longer zipper than necessary, planning to cut off the extra.  The bulk of the zipper coil added to the linen made it impossible to get a cleanly turned corner.  I also realized I was going to have trouble hand sewing in the lining and making it fit correctly with the awkwardly turned corner.  I unstitched the entire thing and started over.

After much trial and error what finally worked for me was to sew the lining pieces together into a tube and the outer fabric into another.  I placed the lining inside the outer sleeve, serged the raw edges together and treated it as one.  I sewed in about 1.5” on each end of the top opening and set a smaller zipper into the remaining opening.  The zipper is stretched out flat and is merely topstitched into place.  The zipper tape hides the serged fabric edges.

I thought perhaps I could sell bags like this in my (coming soon) Etsy store.  I imagined they might make great gifts for bridal attendants.  But I will have to come up with a much more streamlined design for the bag if that is going to work, as the amount of time I spent just constructing this bag makes it impractical as a commercial item.  This was a good lesson that dreams need to be tested out in reality to make sure they will work.

I'm sharing this post today with the folks over at Today's Creative Blog on their Get Your Craft On feature.  Check them out.

Try, Try Again

Well, I had good intentions for my Bag of the Week post but it’s not going to happen.  The creative part is all finished and it is super cute.  In fact, I told a friend two days ago, that this has been my FAVORITE project in a long time.  I loved how it was turning out.  That all came to a screeching halt today when it came time to construct the bag.  Don’t you hate when that happens?  A project is going along wonderfully and then, somewhere between steps 12 and 13, it goes from being a favorite to being a wadder.  This bag’s fate isn’t quite that dire but it will take some unstitching, redesigning and reworking to make this a success.  And it has to be, because the details on it are just too cute to trash.

So, instead of posting a Bag of the Week today I will defer and post two next week.

My hope is always to provide inspiration to my readers but today’s post should also remind you that, as a sewing blogger, I show you only the projects I want you to see.  All of us have projects that are just not worthy of show and tell.

Choosing Colors

Sometimes I have a hard time choosing colors.  I know that a lot of quilters instinctively know which colors to combine for maximum effect but I have to exert a bit more effort.  Here’s an example of my typical thought process:  I want to pick a complementary fabric for a red piece.  The complement to red is green.  This red leans toward orange and the complement of orange is blue so I want a blue green fabric to offset my red fabric.  I can usually get this far.  But my current project was giving me more trouble.  First, I needed several colors, not just one complement.  The color of the fabric is a dusty aqua and, frankly, I was having a lot of trouble finding colors I liked with this piece.  I tried my usual method (blue green should have complement of red orange) but I didn’t like this combination.  So I turned to a really useful tool I have used in the past for help.

The Color Wizard on colors on the web is a handy tool for picking out color schemes for all sorts of purposes.  I used it initially when designing my blog.  Here’s how it works.  Each of the 216 web-based colors has a six-digit alphanumeric number assigned to it which is its unique identifier.   You enter this code into the Color Wizard and the program displays various color combinations that work with that color.

I took my light aqua piece of linen to my scanner and scanned in an image.  I then took that picture into Photoshop and determined what the color was (you can do this by picking up a sample of the color with the eyedropper tool).  I opened the screen for selecting colors and, because my scanned photo was much lighter than the actual fabric, moved my selection around until I found a similar but deeper color that approximated the true fabric color. 

This gave me the hex code I needed which I popped into the Color Wizard and came up with a complementary set of colors for my project.   I was surprised to see that my estimated “red orange” color was nowhere to be found in the selections (so much for my usual method). 

(If you think this tool is as useful and cool as I do, do not over look that little button in the lower right hand corner of the Color Wizard screen that says Donate Now.  If this is a tool you will use often please consider making a small donation to the creator of the technology.)

I then went to my thread collection and found some spools that approximated the colors suggested to me by the Wizard and played around until I found a combination that I liked.  I find thread useful when determining colors as I have a pretty wide selection and they are small and easy to hold against other objects to test their effects.

I am very excited about the project I’m working on and can’t wait to share it with you.  I’m hoping to have it finished to feature as my bag of the week later on this week.  Stay tuned!

Bag of the Week 41

Asian Coin Purse

The other night I went out to a workshop.  I wanted to take a smaller purse than my usual big, clunky one so I transfered some necessities from the latter to the former.  Each time I do this I think:  I sure wish I had a little coin purse to put these things in.  It seems very haphazard to stick a credit card, drivers license and some bills randomly into a bag.  So, needing a bag to post this week, I headed to my studio to make myself something that would suit the bill. 

I recently took a class where I started a beautiful Asian style portfolio (hopefully I will finish it this year and post it as a BOTW) and I had some scraps left from the piecing I did for that project.  I added some extra strips, cut the resulting piece into two rectangles (about 6" x 5.25") and free-motion quilted them onto a foundation of muslin.  I have always admitted I am a pretty lousy free-motion stitcher but I persevere, believing that the only way I will get better is with some practice (I'm not there yet).  The coin purse has a zipper at the top and is lined with more cotton fabric.

Now I have the perfect little coin purse to keep my loose items neatly organized in my purse.  This took very little time (certainly less than an hour) and I used up some leftovers in the meantime -- bonus!